5/17/15 - 30 Weeks & 7790 Frames Later...

My film is complete!

It's been a long, arduous road, and there have been several instances where I thought this film wasn't going to make it, but it's done, and I'm super proud of it.

Here's the vimeo link: https://vimeo.com/128090406 (pw: nitnoi)

Time to pass OUT.

4/09/15 - And a Month and a Half Later...

I swear I didn't forget about this blog. I've just been busy staring at Maya for the past 7 weeks and splining animation keys left and right. I just get so distracted from all the fun I'm having that I can't find any time to post a worthwhile update.

HOWEVER —

Now I know I said I wasn't going to post any animation on here until I was done, but I figured I'd go back on my word and post my current playblasted rough cut. I have about a third of the film left to fully animate and I still need to fine tune a couple of shots, but it's a lot of progress from the last post so I'm pretty proud of myself.

The water effects haven't been included yet since my technical person is currently working on that and I still have 2D effects to draw out. Sound is in progress and I'm especially excited with my composer's work so far (which isn't in this version of the rough cut but I can assure you it's pretty quality stuff).

Anyways it's currently week 10 and my thesis advisor keeps reassuring me that I'm at a decent place in terms of my timeline, but I'm not sure whether or not she's lying to me to keep me motivated. Regardless I feel a lot less behind compared to two months ago and I might even start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel pretty soon. WEEK 15 HERE I COME.

2/23/15 - Finalizing the Look

Ok so you know how last blog post I promised I'd have animation up in this one? Good news is that I do have animation, bad news is that I've decided not to put any of it up to build suspense and excitement for the final product (I SWEAR I HAVE STUFF ANIMATED THO).

HOWEVER, in order to make up for broken promises I present to you screenshots of my final (for the most part) character textures. This is without any shadow/AO passes and possibly also specular.

That's all I have for this post — next one will probably be text updates since I want to keep the rest of the film under wraps as much as possible. 

Although here's a small look on how progress is going:

1/28/15 - Back on the Strugglebus™

It's been about two and a half weeks since my last entry, and I'm proud to say that I finally have a completed forest! It turned out better than I imagined, especially since organic environments are my biggest modeling pothole (with character faces coming in at a close second). Although at this point if I have to paint another tree I might just spontaneously combust.

Here's what I have so far with the forest (this is of course before fancy color correction and post-effects)

The stream-bed is still dry because water hasn't been composited onto it yet (that's my technical director's job).

And here's the overall setup:

I think with how my shots are framed you won't get to see much of the higher foliage/mountains/sky, which is too bad because I spent a good chunk of time painting all of that. :( I also ended up cutting corners with the extra shrubbery by texturing them the same way I did for my previous film: create plane -> subdivide -> 'puff' out flat geometry using soft select -> slap on a flat painting of fauna -> adjust to give illusion of 3D or make duplicates to create more volume. It's a fast formula that works every time.

So with about 95% of my texturing and modeling out of the way I can finally concentrate solely on animation, which I swear I've been doing. I have to get at least 50% of my animation done in 4 weeks for my thesis rough cut so in my next blog post I promise I'll show some characters actually moving.

Lord give me strength.

1/10/15 - More Textures!

This is sort of a continuation of the last post, but this time I actually have environment textures to show. There's a minor texture issue with some of the hut objects, but I'm working on fixing those, promise.

And here's the setup:

It looks pretty bland, I know, but I plan on adding an AO and shadow pass to give everything more depth. Color correction/artificial lighting will also happen once this gets into post. But yeah, for the most part this is the style I'm going for with my textures and I'm pretty dead-set on it. Character textures, however, are still a work in progress because surface shaders aren't as kind to them as they are to my environment.

My goals for my last two weeks of winter break involve getting the forest environment setup, finalize character textures, get more animation done, and finish up the rest of my texturing/assets. Mainly the animation part though because good lord I am so behind.

1/02/15 - New Year, Same Grind

First of all, I believe it's common courtesy to wish others a Happy New Years, so to those who actually bother to peruse the contents of my thesis blog, Happy New Years (at this point it should be 2015 for everyone around the world)!

I apologize for the lack of blog posts during the past two months, but rest assured, work is definitely being done. However this post is mainly going to focus on showing off my textures since animation is still in the works at the moment and doesn't deserve blog-worthy screen-time yet (or long story short: painting skin-weights suck and animation is delayed because of it).

But I digress.

Now with my textures I initially went with my traditional method of shadering (not an actual term), which simply involved creating a plain lambert and slapping on an image file of my painted texture. However, the main problem with this was that I had to be very picky about my lights and I'd have to constantly adjust them to work with the entire scene as a whole. Lighting a single object is one thing, but having to make those lights work with several other objects is a monster to handle (and it's far beyond my skill level at the moment). So initially using my tried and true method my krathong looked like this:

It honestly doesn't look that bad, but this involved 3 carefully positioned lights set at various intensities and colors. Now imagine having to use those same 3 lights for the rest of my objects and environments — even if there was a way to keep lights linked to certain objects (which I'm sure there is), I'm not ready to kill my computer with over 10 lights in my scene. Also as pretty as this look was it wasn't the 2D/flat 3D look I wanted to shoot for so I had to go back to the drawing table and start researching for an alternative shader solution.

Several days of researching and enlightening talk with my advisor led me to a very simple solution: surface shaders. In hindsight I really should've explored this shader more but I was too comfortable with my blinns and lamberts to step out of my texturing comfort zones. The surface shader made it so I could attach my painted textures without having to worry about lighting my object, and also maintains a fairly flat look since it's unaffected by light or shadow. Of course this is also a con since I don't want my film to look completely flat, but I came up with a solution to solve the flatness simply by creating an AO pass and a shadow transparency pass and overlaying them on top of the surface shader.

(left is plain surface shader with my texture, right is surface shader with AO pass on 50% multiply)

As you can see in right image the object kind of mimics the properties of a lambert, but the look is a lot flatter and closer to what I'm aiming for in my film. Even though I removed 3D lights from my textures I can still adjust color and add artificial lighting to my objects and scenes through after effects in post. It's a win/win.

Now as far as my character textures go, zbrush has been temperamental with me and refuses to export my textures so I've been trying to do a workaround in photoshop. The only downside is that I can't directly color on my model so I have to trust my UV mapping and hopefully produce something close to what I had in zbrush. Unlike my environmental assets I plan on directly baking AO into my character textures since the flatness is way too pronounced on the surface shader (and not being able to directly paint depth onto my characters sucks because zbrush is finnicky).

There you have it, PROGRESS. There's other behind-the-scenes stuff that I did but I'd rather lump it in the next blog post when I finally get to show some animation.

11/04/14 - No-Sleep November

The title is not an exaggeration.

In order to catch up to my ever-backed-up schedule I've been working nearly nonstop on polishing my models for rigging and revising my 3D animatic (YEAH YOU HEARD ME) to nail my shots and timing. The latter is still a bit shaky due to quality of my blocking but the total time is officially climbing to 4 minutes and this concerns me a bit. Well, maybe not too much. My last film was about 3 1/2 minutes total with credits and as long as my thesis doesn't go past the 10 minute mark (so lord help me) I should remain sane for the rest of the semester. ANYWAYS point is I'm still behind on schedule, BUT not enough to warrant irrational week 11 stress/panic. That's saved for the spring semester.

NOW FOR SOME GOOD NEWS

I have a lot of stuff to show off in this post, starting with the third revised version of my 3D animatic. Buckle your metaphorical seatbelts and enjoy the ride because it's quite the quality work.

And here are the polished character models (texture/normal maps will come later). Blendshapes and rigging will begin very soon (still need to figure how I'm gonna animate clothes). Otherwise they're all in one piece and fully UV unwrapped (3DUnfold was a great improvement to maya 2015 and I daresay the only improvement worth upgrading for).

But wait, there's MORE. Have an almost completed hut set with some decorations.

I'm not an architect nor do I have an eye for interior design but I'm very proud of what I have so far. I still need to add in some empty pots and bowls and maybe a wall deco or two, but this is pretty much a nearly complete set. Don't be fooled by how plain it looks, though — a good chunk of its aesthetic will come from the texturing. I ain't modeling thatch and bamboo patterns.

I was supposed to get the krathong prop done too but I was more focused on finishing up my characters and making my hut look habitable so I kind of neglected the most important asset of my film (sry). HOWEVER I WILL DEF GET ON TOP OF THAT SOON. By soon I mean this week. Definitely this week. 

Lastly on a very related note, Loi Krathong (the actual festival) is celebrated this month and my mom made her own krathong to float at the local festival which I thought was hella cool so here are some pictures I stole from her facebook.

ONWARD TO WEEK 12 AND THE BEGINNING OF STRESS TEARS!

10/15/14 - Modeling Progress

I mean, sort of...if you count getting Nit's head 90% done and just barely starting Noi's body. Oh, and some hut stuff (SUPER ALPHA VERSION!!).

I'm currently modeling Noi's body, and things are going pretty smooth so far so I anticipate getting that done by the end of this week. The only concern I have is whether or not I want to separate the clothes from the base mesh and use nCloth or just model clothes directly on the skin...we'll see.

I'm also working on a comprehensive shotlist, so look forward to that too.

10/05/14 - Too Many Triangles

Good news: I finally started character modeling!

Bad news: It took me an entire weekend to model a head because I had to revisit how2facial topology. I also had to problem-solve my way through a bunch of dastardly triangles and n-gons, and before I knew it was already 4AM and I had skipped dinner. Maya also crashed on me twice. I blame upgrading to 2015.

Here's what I have so far — I still have to finish up the headwrap and add teeth/tongue, but for a weekend of work I'm rather proud of myself. Last time I took a character modeling class the head alone took me nearly 2 1/2 weeks, man.

Okay so yeah, no matter how much I got done this weekend I'm STILL very behind. My plan this week is to definitely finish up Noi and get started on Nit, and if all goes well I might even get to start on their bodies too. Next week I'll need to begin staggering my modeling and do props/environment — the struggle bus is slowly but surely breaking down.

9/23/14 - Animaticmatic

Cranked this out a week before animatic night, which was truly quite a feat considering I tend to wait until the night before to get it done.

Believe or not, this was actually my 3rd revision for the animatic based on advisor and peer feedback — I have some more things to revise but this is about 80-90% of what my film is gonna be. 

As far as overall thesis progress goes I'm kind of (not surprisingly) behind but I plan on having my modeling assets listed by next week and if possible, get started on character modeling. I foresee having the shot list done after animatic night (Oct 1st/2nd) depending on how much useful feedback I get.

WEEK 5, LEGGO.

9/08/14 - Some Semblance of Storytelling

K guys, here it is. THE THUMBNAILS (not storyboards because I want to cut stuff out before I get started on those).

These are incredibly rough an scribbly, so I apologize in advance for hurting your eyes. BUT YES, THEY EXIST NOW. These took me a while just because I had a really hard time trying to figure out what kind of shots/angles I wanted to use to condense my treatment as much as possible without compromising the story. Based on past thumbnailing using the same 30-odd template I predict the final film might hit somewhere between 4-5 minutes. I honestly pray that it doesn't go over.

By next entry I plan on getting storyboards half done — from now until week 5 (before animatic night) I want to get at least 10 boards done PER DAY and start timing out my current thumbnails into an animatic.

9/01/14 - It's September Already?!

I started my journal title with an '8', only to realize that it was no longer August, but now September (it's actually the 2nd because it's past 12 am now, but for sanity's sake I'm dating this entry as the 1st). Where did the time go?! 

Okay so last entry I promised storyboards.

Good news and bad news.

Good news, they exist. Bad news, they're very rudimentary and halfway complete. Think crude thumbnails. For some reason the angles and shots play so well in my head, but when I try to translate them into actual storyboards they end up looking messy and confusing. It's truly a struggle.

Anyways, as I continue thumbnailing I already know I'll definitely need to cut scenes/shots — as things are right now it's gonna run a tad bit too long. I'd be torturing myself if I even attempted to animate my entire treatment.

Looking ahead I plan on finishing thumbnails by this weekend, get half of my clean storyboards done by next weekend, and start doing some test modeling on zbrush/maya. In between all of that I still need to work on environment concepts and plan a layout for the hut interior. The list is goes on.

On a separate note, have a mood board. It's primarily for my environment style research and texturing ideas since my character designs are based mostly on life research and not any particular designs.

As you can see I really want to achieve a bright, painted look in my film and give it almost a 2D-like effect through my usage of textures. I know I'm not as adept in my digital painting skills as the French artists above, but I'm very attached to this style and will try to work with it to the best of my abilities.

8/22/14 - And More Progress-ish

Guess who has their character designs done? THIS PERSON. Although I'm still behind because I need to work on environment concepts now and all I have is research and 3 days before classes officially start. But it's okay, I thrive on the deadline grind.

So yes, character designs. Here's Nit (mother) and Noi (child) and their palette options (subject to change as I get into actual modeling/scene lighting)

 Relative size comparison:

I'm currently working on some poses/expressions/general comparison art so I'll get those up as soon as I can!

8/13/14 - Progress is Progress

First off, I revamped the blog layout and added a swanky new banner that took me about 45 minutes to make — LEGIT, RIGHT? I try, I try.

Blog layout achievements aside, here are some of my initial concept sketches that I had to submit along with my thesis proposal a couple months ago:

There's a whole bunch more in my sketchbook, except I left it in Rochester and won't be in possession of it until about another week. I'm also currently working on my final character designs so I'll try to have those up as soon as possible. All in all there hasn't been much progress per say, but it's still progress. Having a job over the summer was one of my major distractions from working on my thesis, unfortunately.

In spite of my lack of thesis productivity for the past two months my plan for the next two weeks before school starts is to get my character designs done, get some environment concepts out, and begin thumbnailing my story. According to my submitted thesis schedule:

I have to have my storyboards done by week 3 and frankly I'm pretty sure that's not gonna happen so I definitely need to kick my ass into gear and do as much as I can before the semester begins. Future me is gonna hate current me but what can you do.

On a more positive note, I have a composer! I'm really excited about working with him and hopefully he can bring some more culture to my film through his compositions~ Now I just need to contact a sound designer and I'll be able to remove some major weights off my shoulders.

6/23/14 - Greetings

It's almost July and I'm finally making my thesis production blog. THESIS? WHAT THESIS? Yes you heard me, thesis — as in my last animated film before I graduate.

So I'm gonna be honest: I haven't been the least bit productive at all on this front. In fact, even though I scheduled the entire summer to do a crapload of research/pre-production my thesis advisor (bless you Atia) strictly advised me against following said schedule because she knew I wasn't going to do anything anyways (and she was right). HOWEVER let's at least consider the creation of this blog a good start. And to my defense, I've also been learning Zbrush on the side so that should count for something right?

Okay so excuses aside, let's get back to the main point of this blog: THESIS.

What does 'Krathong' (pronounced KRA-TONG) mean, you ask? Bam.

If you don't want to read through the whole article it's basically a Thai word for a (usually beautifully crafted) float.

And herein lies the heart of my thesis.

Without giving too much away, 'Krathong' is a folktale-like story revolving around the use of a krathong to bring about rain (coincidentally rain seems to be a recurring theme in most of my films (see: Thirst), but I can't help it, I love the dang trope). The film is primarily 3D, but there are also 2D elements (a sequence and vfx) and I plan on texturing my models to give it a 2D effect.

I'll update this blog as pre-production happens (crossing my fingers) and keep y'all excited for newer things to come!

Also it's a great way to convince y'all that I'm actually doing something.