One concern I have been having my handling of the project so far is the lack of any formal design sheets for my characters and environmental design. In a professional context, design sheets are important in developing ideas, as they serve as sort of visual mind-maps, for comparing, contrasting and finalising ideas in the pre-production stages of an animation. Animation, as opposed to photography or film, is a medium in which the essence and aura of the work is created primarily in the pre-production phase, and so as such it is important to meticulously plan every element of the design of the production in order to ensure a high quality final product. This is one area I feel that so far with the production of this animation I have been slacking, so I went back this week, accumulating my work on character designs from my sketchbooks in order to create some more formalised design sheets that better reflected my though process in the creation of my character.
In my initial designs for my character I toyed around with the idea of having her wear a burlesque mask, with a feather on it, in order to lend a mysterious and somewhat erotic aura to the design. I created several variations of how the character's face might look, but ended up ditching that idea in the end as I felt it took away from the expressiveness of the character's face. With my rig, I wanted the eyes and eyebrows especially to serve as the primary mode of expression in my character's face, and with the mask, this would have been difficult to achieve.
One of the biggest problems I ran into with the creation of my character was simplifying the design in order to better suit the tools I would be using to animate with, in this case DUIK. One thing I have learned so far, which I would reconsider if I were to work on this project again, is that the tools of DUIK are better served to more simplistic, vector based, mo-graph animation, as opposed to the style I was going for, with more moving parts and sophisticated limb and facial movements. This has served as a challenge so far, and is definitely something I will be reflecting on in my evaluation.
For my final character design sheet, I opted for a simpler design with more emphasis on how the character would articulate it's limbs and ensuring proportions were consistent. These two drawings of a front and profile view of the character, served as the basis for two of my final character rigs though in hindsight i really should have distinguished the areas which would be point of articulation in order to ensure the model was as close to the final drawing as possible.
I also produced a design sheet for the lighthouse, however upon completion realised that it would have made the job of modelling a lot easier had I drawn out multiple angles and a floor plan in order to better understand the shape. By only really creating one formalised design sheet, there is a lot of guesswork involved, which I've learned through using Maya is not an efficient or professional way of going about things.
Which is why when it came to the design sheets for the bed I would be featuring in my animation I included a perspective view, a profile and a front view, to provide me with some sort of framework to work off of when it came to the 3D modelling. As a result, the modelling process was nearly as time consuming as was the case with the island and lighthouse.
Storyboarding, in a visual medium for a distinctly visually focused story, is perhaps the most important element of preproduction when it comes to producing an animation, which is why I am disappointed with my efforts as it is usually the aspect of production I enjoy the most and put the most time into outside of initial design and the actual production. So, this week I opted to revisit my storyboards and, taking cues from 'The Art of Pixar' book I own, produce something more akin to Pixar's colour scripts, something more presentable and professional.
While far from perfect, I do feel these revised versions of the storyboards do more clearly communicate the atmosphere and aesthetic of the animation a little more clearly, as well as better communicating a few things which were brought up in the crit session, such as the POV shot through the telescope looking out to sea at the lighthouse in the distance.
Re-designing my Character Rigs
As a result of not properly structuring my workflow or meticulously tweaking my designs in the pre-production stage, my character rig is a mess and as a result I opted to scrap it and start over, this time going by my recently formalised design sheets. The problem was that the character, though the limbs especially, was drawn without the articulation in mind, and as a result moved unnaturally and in a way that distorted the character and didn't look aesthetically pleasing or professional. There were not enough layers for the arms or legs and as a result the mesh deformed and distorted in a very unnatural way. So, for my amended designs, I opted to split the leg/arm into three separate layers, the thigh/upper arm, knee/elbow and calve/forearm. This would allow me to create a 2 layer IK chain in DUIK over three layers with the knee/elbow there to hide any irregularities or deforities which may present themselves when articulating the IK chain, by parenting them to the upper arm/ thigh, ensuring that at no point there is a gap between the assets and that it moves in a way that does not compromise the aesthetic of the character's design.
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