Practical Research Project - Day 1

For this project our instructions are to choose a filmaking technique or approach that we would like to learn more about and to do some individual research into that. I've wanted to learn how to use 3D software for animation, specifically Maya, since it's one of the few major packages available on mac and, on top of that, Autodesk offers a free educational lisence to students.

I'm not so much interested in making whole films in 3D as being able to use 3D elements in combination with 2D. To research what aspects of 3D are most important for this technique, I decided to look at films which use 3D elements in a way I like, and find common factors between them. These are the films (I thoroughly reccommend all of them, if just for the visuals):




Don't swim after lunch from Jens Blank on Vimeo.



Topologies (Excerpt) - Tiepolo from Quayola on Vimeo.



Please Say Something from David OReilly on Vimeo.



Après la Pluie ©2008Gobelins from Emmanuelle Walker on Vimeo.



While looking into how some films were made, I found that several films which I had thought used 3D where actually made entirely in 2D (and some which I'm still not 100% sure about).


Peter & the Space Between from Cartoon Brew on Vimeo.



Countdown - HD from Desrumaux Celine on Vimeo.




Little Boat from nelson boles on Vimeo.

This goes to show that good animation and clever compositing can convincingly imitate three dimensions, but for the sake of broadening my skills I'm going to make the effort to learn the basics of 3D animation anyway, and hopefully some tricks to help blend 3D and 2D elements.

Looking at the films above (including the 2D ones, since I like them, too), the design choices that I feel all of them have in common are:

• Flat or cell-style shading (this is a little ironic, since the 2D ones are cell shaded)
• Restricted colour schemes
• Grain, noise, or brushstroke effects to introduce analog-like elements
• Sharp geometric shapes contrasted with curves
• High levels of stylisation in character design
• Abstract elements

Obviously, five days isn't enough to thoroughly reseach all of these aspects, especially when I first need to learn basic modelling, rigging, animation and rendering in Maya. I've therefore decided to try to model and rig a (very) simple character, animate a small movement, and learn to render and export the result in a way which lends itself to compositing with 2D elements (i.e. cell-shaded).


With complete disregard for logic, I started at the end by checking two tutorials on cell-shading in Maya.

http://shikijiyu.deviantart.com/art/Maya-Toon-Shading-Tutorial-156746043 - easy to follow instructions

http://www.cgchannel.com/2010/05/tutorial-cel-shading-in-maya-with-christophe-desse/

While both are worth a look, neither of them provides a complete route to the result I wanted. The first has clear, easy to follow instructions which give a reasonable result, though only after some tinkering with the settings (see the 1st and 3rd images below). The second completely skims over how to render a cell shaded image in Maya, and instead focuses on compositing seperate outline and fill renders in photoshop. This wasn't particulary helpful to me, but it did indicate a possible direction to take, though my efforts to get an outline that matched the shape of the model ran into some difficulties (see the 5th image below).

Oh, I modelled the bear based on this design, but it could use a bit more work: