Painting Weights: Intern & Zombie

At one point in the project I took over the task from Greg to paint all the weights for the two characters.  I hadn't done it before but I with some of the animation scenes I could check what I'm doing works with the animation and gives the best outcome!

Below are some videos taken of the latest weights for both characters. I know I will need to make per shot edits but these weights should be enough to get things working well!



When creating the hands, I took awhile to get to a point when I was happy with the outcome. I wanted to make sure I gave the animators weights that could be push to extreme poses, and the hands needed loads of tweaking and tests before I got them to this stage.







Below shows an example of before and after! The top image shows the original weights that were handed to me and the bottom image shows my final weights for the zombie. This shot and its animation gave me loads of movement to check my weights with, making sure it holds up with a lot of movement. You can see the trouble areas that occured. It seems the separate meshes were the main problem area. Although if I was to model the character again I would model a full body and use cloth sim!  Although I am happy with the out come of the weights.

These two images, show the advantages you get by using an animation scene as a reference to check your weights as moving the arm in t-pose just doesn't cut it.

Shot0011 Render Dev: Lighting

Here is the development for the light of shot0011. The idea of this office is to highlight the the intern in a darkly lit room. Firstly I decided to use area lights, maximum three. A Key light, Fill light and an additional light from the screen.

Below is an example of the area top light. This is the Key light of the shot as it is there to represent the light above the intern. When I rendered this, there were no textures for the office but it gave me a good idea of what the light is doing.

Once I got that key light in I began to think about colour. I wanted to make sure we set a mood and use the right tone of colour for what is going on in the shot. The image below shows my tests in photoshop.

From this development we light the blue tone and so I go going with trying to get the right of the lighting setup. Something I wanted to add was a green tint from the screen as in the next 2 shots we want the interns face lit up by the screen. I plan to use the books to the left of the Intern to show the green tint from the screen. As you can see without the screen the shot seems very dull and contains to contrast or drama!

Now that I have brought in the screen light I get a nice shadow and highlights on the books. Next plan is to get a green tint as white is again dull and adds nothing to the scene!



Now I got the colour on the screen I am starting to like the the setup. Although I don't think there is enough green tint around the set. The screen doesn't seem to be giving off the colour that it would if it was real.

This is what I'm talking about (below)! I have managed to get the Green tint on the book stacks and back wall, this gives the impression that the screen is giving off a nice amount of light, illuminating whats around it. I feel this is what we are looking for as it lights up the left side nicely as we do see it in other shots and we need some contrast on them to make them interesting! Now its time to get render layers and send it off to comp!

Finalising Textures

Below show 3 images of the development of the shirt bump map. I am looking at how much depth and intensity to put into the bump as things might change under different lighting conditions. 

You can see in the images that the texture is also having some issues when it comes to uv's, this is something about using mudbox and not smoothing the GEO before going into mudbox to texture, we can fix this in photoshop.

What I want to achieve with this development is add some kind of surface detail and variation. As we are not using cloth sim and we have got the power to use extremely high res models, I want to try use some basic procedural techniques I know to add this. Below is an image showing the shader network with the bump elements I added to make these variations details.

As you can see (above), the elements at the bottom and top of the image are the bump sections I added to the surface. Below shows the trouser shader network showing a similar setup but this time has a Displacement map to it.

The last of the 3 images shows the intensity at a high level when the middle image has abit of a mix and has an addition bump showing just a ruff texture to add to the shirt.

Zombie shaders and Textures update

Now time to look abit more into the development of the character of the Zombie. I am looking at the shirt and trousers again as I want to make sure it looks like a ruff worn and torn shirt.

This frame was to look more at the details on the Zombie uncomposited. I am fairly happy with the outcome and the next step is to finalise the textures and shaders.

Here is a more developed look for the trousers. As you can see I have added a ruff type of Bump map to the surface. I think this is a nice start and gives the right impression I am looking for.

First Shot Renders

Time to look at some of the render tests! AlthoughDave is only lighting I have created the lighting for both these shots. My goal for this shot was to try set a mood and try emphasis that the intern is alone and isolated in this office. The shot below has been comped by Steph, but I think we all agree that there is work to do and good room for development.



Below is an example of shot0014 render! I again did the lighting for this shot and I am very pleased with the outcome. I used shaders and a area light to try capture the screen in the Interns eyes as that is one of the key lights in the scene, illuminating the interns face. There is work to be done in comp but this was just a straight 3D render!

Intern Texture Draft:01

Now time to start developing the Shaders. Starting with the Shirt for the intern! The idea is that I want to add a light shirt type of bump texture to the surface. As you can see below I had a few problems with the bump as I keep getting the strange effect at the lower part of the shirt. 

I tried by removing the bump (below) and the displacement to see what was causing the problems. Although if its uv related then I will need to fix that, which will cause reworks on the whole shirt development.

Now I tried just the bump on its own, as you can see it works fine. So the displacement map is causing a problem, that can be down to the uv's or some of the GEO. But for now I am actually preferring the shirt without the DSP as the wrinkles are thicker and the GEO works better with the light.

Here is a quick full render of the intern as it stands at the moment. I am fairly happy although I think things will change more and more when we get lighting tests scenes from shots and also seeing how well it looks animated.

Zombie Texture draft:01

First look at the shadows with the first draft of textures from steph. I think we have made great progress and we are getting the right look. Although I feel that surfaces of the shirt and trousers are abit to smooth and I plan to develop this next and try get abit of ruff surface texture using procedural bump maps.

Zombie Colour Dev

 Here is a first look at adding some colour onto the Zombie. This is going to be developed quite abit now and I am going to start to develop the shaders and start to get things working ready for rendering shot tests!

Zombie Character Sheet

Here is a first look at a pose zombie using the rig. I do this to see how the rig works and whether or not the movement you can achieve with the rig is good and easy to use. The render I am fairly happy with, although there are some areas needing work, as the legs are coming through the socks and some of the shirt is playing up but first impression things are going well!

Zombie Blendshapes

The Zombie blendshape did not need to have as much depth as the interns as the jaw is one of the key features or the zombie and that fact he has no eye lids or lips we did not really need to develop them at all. Although the videos shows how the topology works to fit the wide movement of the jaw. The main idea behind the zombie blendshapes was the eyebrows as it will give abit more development to the animators.

Rig:



Smooth:



Wireframe:

Intern Blendshapes

Here shows the blendshapes development. The intern will need a wide range of motion and be able to pull multiple amount of facial expressions as we have kept the interns design to a more simple design. I have used Zbrush to develop the blendshapes, within Zbrush I would create a base layer which from that I would make a layer for each blendshape. See images below showing each layer labelled with the name of the blendshape.

With this in mind I would sculpt what is needed on the layer and with Zbrush layers I can blend between the two so I could see the movement and be able to develop it with the ability to see the movement without setting up a blendshape chain in Maya.

Below shows three videos with the rig and how that moved to control the blendshapes, the smoothed out come and a wireframe example.

Rig:


Smooth:



Wireframe:



The image below shows each individual blendshape I created in Zbrush. When I export the files from Zbrush it creates all the blendshape connections within maya so I can see that all my movements I saw with Zbrush have been carried across. Also Zbrush is good to see how it moves but within maya I can mix and match the layers together to see that I can create different facial expressions.