Author: Roos Stolk

Nuke

Week 4: Rotoscoop

Rotoscope animation describes the process of creating animated sequences by tracing over live-action footage frame by frame. Though it can be time-consuming, rotoscoping allows animators to create lifelike characters who move just like people in the real world.

Video about rotoscoping

For nuke, we now started to learn about rotoscoping. In class, we learn about rotoscoping and how to translate this into the nuke file. We got a file delivered in which we had to make the rotoscope, this is a file of a man running over a bridge. While looking at the video you might think that it would be easy since the camera doesn’t seem to move by itself. but if you look really closely you will see that it shifts a bit to the right.

We got the assessment to firstly rotoscope the man running towards us. He showed us how to start with the basic Rotonode, I made 5 different Rotoscopes of the man running. This is because a lot of his body moves in different ways which, if you would do it in one rotoscope, would make it a very difficult assessment. So I did the 2 arms, 2 legs, 2 feet, torso, and head separately so I could also jump from frame 20 to frame 40 and it would still look quite nice. this way I only needed to adjust the Rotoscope a little bit. The rotoscope, in my opinion, could have been done a little better but it is mostly for me to understand how the tool works. For my first time doing a rotoscope, I think I quite get the hang of how the tool works.

Video of a rotoscope of the running man

Maya

Week 3: Wineglasses

In week 3 we also first did a test for wineglasses. We did this so we knew how to work with the spline tool for the hot air balloon.

This week we started by making a new kind of object. We had to create wine glasses and a wine bottle, we did this so we could also figure out how to use the spline tool in Maya, the spline tool is a tool that can be used to create an outline of an object that u want to create. This object will need to be the same on all sides because when you will resolve around the spline tool it will create something like for example a glass.

As an end result, I got these 2 glasses with a wine bottle on a table. We also looked for a background view so that when you would render out the product the light and the shadows would all fall into the correct places. looking back at the glasses that I made I think they came out very good. The texture put over it really gives it a wine glasses feeling to it. Yet again if I look at the shape and the proportions I think I could have paid a little bit more eye to detail to make it more realistic.

model viewport of glasses (without texture)

We also got introduced to the hot air balloon we have to make. This is a project we had to start to combine with our nuke classes. Everybody has to make their own hot air balloon for their hot air balloon festival in their nuke file. We learned a few things over the last 3 weeks to get a good start on our hot air balloon. for example, the glasses we made had the spline tool in them that we can use for the ropes on our hot air balloon.

Design For Animation

Week 3: Accepted

For this assessment I choose the movie: Accepted

Story Arc

You -> the protagonist: The protagonist of the story is Bartleby Gaines
Need -> Something isn’t right: The protagonist Bartleby did not get in to any collage
GO! -> Crossing the threshold: Since he did not get accepted at any collage he decided to make his own collage acceptance form where he got accepted to S.H.I.T collage
Search -> Road of trials: A lot of people applied and got accepted to his ‘fake’ school. So he had to design a program of learning for these students of his school, this is different then a normal collage, here the students got to pick what they want to learn and Bartleby’s school started to look like a real school (but in a chaos way)
Find -> Meeting the goddess: As time goes by he finds a way to make his school work without teachers and without specific classes. He went to the real collage next door to get inspiration but did not like how the educational structure was designed
Take -> Meeting your maker: Since S.H.I.T is not a real school an other school was complaining about this and called the police, therefore they had to go into trail to see if they could become a new school.
Return -> Bringing it home: After the trail he got a year of trial to see if his school would work out.
Change -> Master of both worlds: After the trial you see that a lot of the chaos that the school was before became more of the order, so a little bit of both worlds.

Archtypes

Bartleby: Protagonist therefore the hero
Sherman: The Ruler, Controle: He provides structure [makes the school website, only one that really got accepted to a ‘real’ collage and provides an appointment with the school board for the trial.]
Rory: explorer, freedom: Exploring what she wants to add to the system they created.
Monica: Lover, intimacy
Abernathy: Jester, pleasure: He connects everyone by having ADHD and saying everything he thinks

Timeline before the story

Before the story were his years in high school. During his high school years he got into a club. In this club they already did illegal things. he made these fake ID’s for everyone with the group members of his club where they had a photographer and someone doing finances etc. He was the one getting all the costumers to the club place and designed the whole idea. Therefore they made quite some money during their high school life. His grades where average and just enough to make his years.

Design For Animation

Week 2: Thesis question

The start point of the small thesis assignment:

How empathy is created in animation and how much realism you need for it

Keywords:

Motion capture – Empathy – Sad – Facial – Voice actors

Introduction:
For this research I want to dive into how emotions have been portrayed in animations. There are different techniques for creating emotions in an animation. You can think of motion capture, But also you can animate a bag of beans that looks sad. It all creates empathy for the audience. In this paper I want first want to look into different categories that can provoke different emotions (such as, sound, different angles, coloring, lighting).

Design For Animation

Week 1: Discussion thesis

Post author By Roos Stolk
Post date 25th October 2022
No Comments on Week 1: Discussion thesis

In the first week at the end of the class we sat down with a group of people to discuss an idea of the topic we are going to work on for our thesis. We were in a group with 6 people and we all discussed a little about what kind of ideas we have. these are the points we discussed

How actors have to play a role in animation by using motion capture
How old animation style tools are used in modern day software
Problems in visual effects, such as technical or skilful
Visual effects in space opera genres and how it reinforces animation
Live action comparison in postproduction and visual effects
The interrogation of film action visual effects

Nuke

Week 2: City

As an assessment, we had to do about the city, and I choose to be more specific in a category: people and nightlife. A city is made through the people living in it. People make the city during the day you will see many different people on the streets. but mostly people that are in a hurry, in their car, or walking to their destination.

Since I am from the Netherlands I don’t know too much about London life and especially London nightlife. a lot of people really are alive during the nighttime. they go out, go clubbing, and do other fun things with their friends. You see a lot of different types of people during the nightlife which I find very interesting. In this video, you see a lot of the nightlife of the city, the city in the dark. But if I were to reflect back on it I would more directly make the video about the people. I regret not asking for a close-up of these unique people. because in my mind every individual makes a place.

Maya

Week 2: Lego man

This week was for me my first Maya class on sight, the class started with making something from scratch. but this time something have we used more different components. So Nick came up with the idea of doing a lego man for this week’s class. I had a lot of struggles during this class since I just really started with using Maya, I have used Maya once before but I normally used C4D so I was used to the structure of that software. Nick is a very good teacher but sometimes goes quite a bit to fast for me, also because I’m new to Maya. I can imagine if you are used to Maya it would be normal to follow along but for me it went quite fast.

Aside from the class, we learned a few different elements in this class. Doing a lego man makes you work with different shapes, it learns you how to visualise the right shape for a different piece of your model. Also, did we get this extra element where we had to bend the arm so it would fit like a normal lego man character. In this build, we got 5 different components since the legs and the arms only need to be mirrored. As for the other components you have the head, the body, and the part that goes in between the legs.

[Images of my process in Maya]

For the end result you can look at the images just below, I found an image of a lego man’s face that I have also added to my work. Looking back at my work I think I did quite well in keeping track of how to model the different parts and putting them together. But if I look at my lego man now I clearly see that it is very out of proportion compared to a normal lego man. If I would have to do it over again I would redo the scaling on the different parts so it would be more in the right proportions

Nuke

Week 1: Time

Time is an illusion created by the human mind, We created this term time to define life. As I think that if we were immortal, the term life wouldn’t exist and we didn’t have to live by the design of time.

As I show in my pictures I have different pictures of how my mind defines time in a moment. The top two pictures show how something from it’s little seed to become a big leaf and then decay back in to the earth, this all as time passes by.

The third and fourth picture shows how many humans define our surroundings by different tools. as time passes by many humans have created different art forms on the walls as for year ago it could have looked totally different.

The last 2 pictures are related to time passing by through a day. In the evening somethings will look different then during the day.

Maya

Week 1: Cybertruck

This week I was still having problems with my visa, Due to this I was not able to fully apply to the course and had 3 days of delay. For this, I had to later refollow this class and do the assignment everybody did. For this weeks class we started a few basics of the Maya class. To start we had to make a cyber truck.

As shown below I did a simple Tesla truck to recreate the class we did during this week. I worked with a simple cube and cylinder and added this together to make my final product.

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories