Here Im going to show you some promo pictures from the Ident intro and a shot from the film. Since monday Remi and Me have been working on a cool ident for the film. I did the idle animation on the robot to the right, wich I also made earlier. I aslo lighted, shader adustment and materials, rendering, and composeting the shot in a program that was totally new to me. I did get some help and tips for the post work by Adrian and Xia. I feel the intro turned out really nice, and Im pleased with the result. This was a fresh breeze after doing alot of animation. And Im glad I got to do something I loved here at the end of the project. Hope you like it and you will be soon able to view the film!

Look at me, spamming away blogposts today =) Our project is near the end, and I must say that my interest and motivation for doing this school stuff is a bit lower then before. Like my teacher said, my body is here, and my soul is at my upcomming job at storyline studios. I cant hide the fact that my mind drifts of there from time to time, but I still think its important to complete the school and do my best on this student film. Not as much for myself, but to support my production team. They all have been working hard on this film, and I feel that I cant let them down by quitting now. Dont get me wrong, it's still fun to work on this film and beeing social at school. So there would not be any reason to quit really =)

I feel that we did a good job on this film, and its soon coming to an end. I hope we get everything done and polished with sound, It seems that way at the moment. So thanks to all the hard workers on SAX production: Adrian, Remi, Sebastian, William and Xia.

Our film will hopefully be shown, among others at Latter on akerbrygge the 18'th of june. Come and see it! It's defenatly going to be a fun night.

Animation:

Just to sate the obvious fact, Im not a fan of animating. I dont hate it, but I would rather do something else. Considering this, I did a lot of animation on this film. And from time to time, I actually had some fun. The thing about animation is that i can bring characters to life and play with them. Make them do the things I want them to do. So for people with controll issues: Start animating! hehe, just joking. Or not =)

As time went by on this project I felt that animating wasnt so bad. I got better at it, and i feel good for "taking one for the team"
It was ofcourse very helpfull to work side by side with the rest of the team. To get critique when I needed it to make the animation better. As many know you go "blind" working for a long period of time on your own assignment, and then its allways good to have helpfull team mates around you.

The step by step: I start of by getting all the info I need on frame rate, frame timeline, and so on. Then I sometimes draw out a short storyboard for myself on the action, and I also look at the storyboard and animatic for reference. Then it's time for blocking out the animation. Finding the right timing and all that. Then Its just building ontop of that. The same method as all artwork I do, I start of with the large parts and moving on to the details at the end. Like in this case, the fingers and other small parts. Then I show my fellow students the animation, and get tips on what to inprove or so forth. Then I take the last finishing polish, adjusting curves, details and tweaking timing.

TIME:
In our film production we have managed our time very well. We have a good production plan, a week by week setup. Personally I think we did well during the production. We could ofcourse had done it better, but due to the fact that we are students it worked very well. As for my self I feel i managed my time good, and now that the end of the project is near, I dont have mutch to do actually. This is a good thing though =)

In our production there has been different kinds of "stressphases" In the start, there was alot to do for the planners, modellers, storyboard and concept artists. But now at the end these "jobs" does not excist. Now it's the compositing crew that are really stressed. In a studio there would not be as much free time for people as in this production. The difference is that a studio allways have pending jobs. So all of the crew allways have something to do, even if their not working all together on the same project. So in this case, I have been working on personal projects when my assets were not needed in different parts of the production.

I will be working at Storyline studios from august 2010. Needless to say, I'm very excited and I cant wait to get started working there. Storyline studios is the largest supplicant to Norwegian film industry, and they have a lot of great competence.
I will be working as a VFX artist / 3d designer / concept artist.

Again, I cant wait to get started and I feel I made the right choice, as I'm going to learn a whole bunch of new stuff!
I've always had a goal to work in the film industry and I'm very happy it would kick off so soon.

Check out their website for showreels and more: www.storylinestudios.no

The texture of the main character has been final for some time now, time to write about it!
The texture was done in bodypaint and photoshop. The useage of bodypaint was fantastic! The amount of precise detail in the texture was easy to achieve compared to UV layout in photoshop. I also got a lot of illusions to geometry that isn't really there. I'm glad i took the time to learn this new texture program as it really paid of. I also did a gradient to the texture depending on what would be damaged to the sunlight. Meaning that red would become slightly more orange in "sun" parts and so on. I also made the texture choice towards the large parent robot that this one is recycled by. So they would match. I also made different tests on how to make the texture better. Simply painting and tweaking colors in photshop. Then use the reference to make it right in the program. If there was anything I would do different, it would be to use bodypaint on all the other characters as-well.

The story has been a bit loose and hard to get right during our film production. I started out with Remi's and my early idea about the main robot function. The idea was that he projected artistic film through he's lens to inspire people with art. To give him a different purpose in the society.

After that I sat down and wrote a short treatment on a more developed idea. The theme and and story was a bit risky, witch i like. The idea was about the robot that was somehow able to record things, that happened to him during his one day lifespan. And the general behavior between people and robots was ignorant and careless. This behavior of individuals was then presented at the end of the film when our mainbot had given up, trying to fit in. The presentation was to be shown down by the sea, projecting clips on the fog and water reflections in a stunning way. Making people observant to what he was trying to achieve, but then again, people didn't care that much. And the robot ran out of power and shut down. The punchline of the story was fitting into the society, and how someone may get left out. Also a reminder of people's ignorance.

There was a lot of talk about this ending, how it might not make the message clear, and some didn't think it would fit at all.
Lucky, we had a good story to rewrite, and we have been thinking about it for some time now. The story has now (hopefully) come to an end. Sebastian, Paul (our teacher) and Myself sat down one day and brainstormed some ideas. And the result was this:

The story is pretty much the same, our main character trying to fit into the society. But there is one small change that will change the ending and the point trough out the whole story. The underlying plot is that our society leak of electricity. And the energy will soon run out. This means no more "life" for robots, and no more electricity of mankind. To build up this idea Ive made "flayers" that will be as a background asset trough out the film, as well as a flayer that one of the commercial robots hand out. Our main character will interact with this robot and the flayers as well. Our main character will be on the search of electricity in the story, because he is a result of a recycle of a larger robot. This means he's running out of time, low on energy. At one point he interacts with a fuse box. And towards the end when he has given up fitting in, he see a line of street lights. Now he understand that he needs power to keep on "living" He starts to follow these lights on the way to find the power-source to recharge himself.
On the way he slowly shuts down and "die" when all lights are out on the character, we see the flayer we've seen trough out the film, and it reads: ENERGY CRISIS! (image below)

To sum up, our main seeks to fit in, fails after many attempts. When he has given up, he finds his most important purpose, survival. He chases the energy to find the source, but "dies" in the attempt of finding it. Ending the story sadly with a message that has been running trough out the whole story.

Myself, I think this is a very good ending, we build empathy for the clumsy, cute robot that struggles to fit in. And when he found the easy solution that's been there all along, right in front his nose. He dies before finding it. Just because he didn't fit in, and nobody helped him to find the solution. Maybe the other robots wanted the little energy left for themselves, or simply was ignorant. I think this sends a underlying message to how many people care and treat other random individuals.
The underlying message is strong and hopefully many people who watch our end result will get the story and the message.

Here is some images from the past weeks.
The large t-rex concept drawing is by Remi Strand.
The two images from our first testrender shot is made by Adrian Fjellberg, model by Remi Strand and rigg by Sebastian Antonsen.
The small chubby character is made by me (Einar Martinsen)
The robot with multiple arms washing a window is made by me (Einar Martinsen)
The clay render of the main character floating in the air is made by me (Einar Martinsen)
The lazy hungeback character at the end is made by me (Einar Martinsen)

I do not have any animation tests from Willam Christoffersen, or any material/composition testing by Xia Yefu. But check out their website, something may be there.

The subject is something that many people may want to know, I sure did before I figured out the pipeline.

Creating your 3d mesh ready for Rigging without texture, so you can adjust texture even after the animation is done!


The thing is to create a 3d model ready for rigging and animation. For weeks now I've been trying to achieve to right pipeline to make the rigger happy, along with myself as I would texture the model. I've enjoyed working with Sebastian on these models, and I'm thankful that he is a strict rigger. All the critique I've received in the early stage of making the characters ready for rigging has opened my eyes on how to make a more solid model in a technical aspect. It's a great way to work in the same studio with other artist that are going to use your model for rigging, texture, shading etc. You really need to think about what you are doing, keeping things clean, naming parts and material and keeping your files organized. Again, I cant describe how much I've learned about making a studio product.

OK, some step by step notes for making a model ready for rigging with the ability to adjust texture later on:

Smart polycount.
make sure things are standing in 0 XYZ axis.
make sure things are lined up correct in all views.
Unwrap everything, and UV map things that does not need a unwrap.
Make a multisubobject material.
Assign material to material ID's.
Name everything so other people see what you are doing.
NO turbosmooths or smooths for that matter.
talk to your rigger about attaching meshes.
Collapse all bend, symmetry, UVmap, Unwrap etc into a editable mesh/poly.
Attach mesh and make sure the different parts still have their material.
Make sure every mesh has a scale of 100,100,100 in all axis. Or apply a Xform reset and collapse it into the edit mesh/poly.
Do not group meshes.
Control check the model and send it of to the rigger.

Now you should have all your UV- cordinates and materials correctly placed even if one mesh is attached to 10 different meshes
Some difficulties may come up while rigging. Fix it and keep in mind what to do for the next model.

Now you are ready to make a new model and return to a previous one later to texture, sculpt normalmaps etc.
Time saved for the production!

(the image should explain a lot of what i just talked about)

The importance of planing ahead and save time.

Here I'm going to talk about painting a real looking 3d render without doing any zbrush/texture ect. By using techniques in photoshop that I've learned during my 3d experience you can create final "look development" of the character by rendering a flat model and paint on it using smart layer techniques, images and painting with a wacom tablet. The reason why I do this is to save a lot of time and get fast feedback on what looks best. For these two examples I've used a clay render and painted ideas and texture directly on the model. Or exported a mesh to a external render program where you can change textures and lighting in realtime fast. This technique is often used by concept development artist in the professional industry. The client is often someone who does not have technical experience in CG, and needs to see how a character would look even before you make it correct in a 3d application.