It has been far too long since I have updated here the goings of The Green Glider Animated Short. Truth be told the rigging and skinning process of making an animated character move is a big ugly obstacle and the part of the pipeline that definitely is not my favourite, however it must be done! I had the usual array of fuck ups when rigging and skinning the main protagonist of the animated short – Ash. Pose space deformers would mess up out of the blue making it so that poor Ash would have tumours growing out of his asscheeks and elbows or one of the lovely glitches of Ash’s whole face sliding down his jowls in attempt to put him (or me) out of misery.
Poor Ash…
Ash – Body Rig
I am not out of the blue with the rigging and skinning process just yet, I have Ash’s body rigged and skinned and now it is onto the face. Just the sheer idea of seeing the multicoloured floating shapes hovering around Ash and knowing that he is able to move within the greyness of Maya is exciting. I can almost taste the much more enjoyable animation process in the near horizon and can’t wait to bring some life to his pasty face.
Another render from the Green Glider animated short, this time of the lagoon where our protagonist Ash will float in the blissful crystal clear water before he has a sudden epiphany. I wouldn’t mind quarantining here…
I was watching the very beginning series of Tom and Jerry with my niece and was completely blown away by the gorgeous watercolour background paintings while Tom and Jerry run amok in their usual debauchery. So inspired by the paintings I have decided to adopt a similar more analogue and painterly approach, I think bringing down the complexity of many previous attempts of skies that I painted brings more attention and focus to the foreground elements and works better, that same yellow and pink that Tom and Jerry adopted works well for the Meadow scene, which is a pinnacle part of the film and where the beauty of nature of this world needs to really hit home.
〰️ The Meadow Render 1 〰️〰️ The Meadow Render 2 〰️
Some more updates of the Oasis world, I have dialled back the colour and added the grass paint effects as per the previous renders. A water reflection has been added as well as and the same painterly tree alpha maps to draw the eye central to the entrance as that will be where the Green Glider will plop Ash when he is introduced to the Oasis.
I have gone back and decided to do a paintover of the metropolis world for The Green Glider animated short. After playing about with the Oasis world by trying to adopt real world references with the render showing depth and field, focus and atmospheric perspective I have decided that I want the rest of the worlds to follow suit. With previous renders of the metropolis world the bubble cars that are crowded around Ash’s careworn car were too overpowering; even though this would follow theme with how the story unfolds it just didn’t look nice, to combat this I want the lights of the bubble cars to be brighter and more exaggerated with a bokeh effect of yellows and reds dotted around the meandering roads in similar vein to the concept art below.
〰️ The Metropolis Concept Art 〰️
The focus needs to be centred around the Ash’s car with the surrounding areas being blurred which I think can be achieved with render layers and a dark vignette to pull the eye right to our main character. A spotlight on top and pointing down onto Ash’s car will further draw the eye towards him for the opening shot. I also need to reel things back with this world as the render times are horrendous, over a few hours for a single frame isn’t ideal so I’ll have to do some tinkering.
I have been working on trying to achieve a more painterly style with the Oasis world of The Green Glider animated short. To achieve these current renders I collated together many bunches of the 3D trees and plants and rendered them out, I then brought the renders into photoshop and painted over them in three different versions, 1 being the original scratchy and more defined version with clearer visible brush strokes. The second and third iterations blurring them out so they could plop nicely in the background to add more depth. I also made cooler and warmer versions of each painted tree mound and painted some shapes to act as leaves to bulk out areas as seen below.
〰️The Oasis Painted Tress – Clear〰️
〰️The Oasis Painted Tress – Blurry〰️
I then brought those renders back into Maya as alpha maps and situated them accordingly within the scene and added in some of the original 3D trees for the foreground so that it gave more depth of field. To give me more control I used render layers where I added the elements in different collections and rendered them separately – so a render collection for the furthermost elements and a collection for the foregrounds and so on, it means I can have a lot more control in post production if I think something could be blurred further or possibly blend more with the sky colour to give more atmospheric perspective.
〰️ Render Layers Gif 〰️
There was one caveat – previously all the grass was done with alpha maps which was causing a problem where the scene was so populated with alpha maps that light couldn’t render through them and meant that they were rendering black, I found out I had to dial up the render settings to offset this – the ray depth to be specific which resulted in ridiculous render times! So using what I learned about my Boogie Woogie Jive film and the ongoing Ersilia film, I had a muck about with using Maya’s ancient paint effects which worked wonderfully. Within the many keyframe achievable paint effects parameters there is the possibility to animate a slight breeze to the grass, I will definitely be giving that a whirl and see how to looks. I think with these many trial and errors the Oasis is starting to come to fruition, things can be pushed more but I think I am heading in the right direction.
I have been playing about with trying to achieve a more painterly, soft feel for the Oasis with inspiration drawing from impressionist paintings where colour and light play a massive part in showing nature and landscapes. A lot of trial and error has gone into these tests, mainly because of the colour as a lot of impressionist paintings are influenced by vivid fauvism. I attempted to adopt and get into the headspace of an impressionist, by painting with quick brush strokes of light flickering the water, moving clouds and how the colours would merge together with incessantly moving light, always in a state of flux.
I decided to paint over the render to get the feel before I mend Maya to give me similar results, a lot of which will be achieved by rendering out chunks of trees then softening, blurring and painting over them and turning them into alpha maps that I can plop in place; some of which will be a lot more softened or more crisp to draw the eye to where it needs. I am still a bit unsure of the colour just yet, I don’t know if it’s too much so as always feedback is appreciated.
I have been experimenting with how I want to achieve the flower blooms within the story of The Green Glider. These blooms where animated using a mash up of different methods – mainly blend shapes which really in its name where you can blend from one object to another by duplicating the first original mesh editing it a tad and then repeat for a few more. It was tricky to animate as blending the blend shapes to their full extent made the flowers too large and angular so I had to go in and use deformers to bend the flowers down and not dial the blend shapes all the way up.
〰️Blend Shapes〰️
To make the flower petals pop and look more organic after animating using the blend shapes I selected each individual petal and key’d them to pop into place, the animation could be refined more but since the world will be populated with many of these blooming plants and much more abundant with flora I think the overall scene will achieve the vivacious life of the Oasis, tests of how the overall effect looks to come!
I am busy designing a pitch document for a fund with The Green Glider with the first page being an eye catching poster that showcases the story of The Green Glider in one vibrant fun image. I am almost done with the pitch document which was really enjoyable to put my designers cap again and I really like how the poster turned out.
⌇I have been chipping away at plopping out the worlds for The Green Glider. It has been a bit of a journey to get the Oasis up until this point, in truth I wasn’t a fan of the way the Oasis was sprawling out before me with a previous hodgepodge of attempts, The greenery of the world felt too CG, the treetops resembled blobby forms of plasticine and looked a bit sad. I decided to take a step away and revert back to my kit of tricks and influences, the first being taking a long and thoughtful walk in the crisp Autumn morning, when the air is fresh and the dew sticks to my beard…
I’m fortunate enough living in London that an open tree filled park being that of Gladstone park is a stones throw away from me. As I meandered my way among the many trees I took my time to stop and think about the canopy of trees above me; I noticed where I was going wrong with my previous attempts was that of two things, the first being – Light travels through trees, with the previous renders the greenery was a solid mass of geometry making it so that light couldn’t pass through and the second being… I am a bit baffled that I didn’t realise this, texture! When you really look at untouched nature, flowers, grasses and bark, it is bursting with texture that intertwine and lace to form brush strokes of patterns, Phil Gets it with photographs of his many excursions where the photographs end up looking like a painting filled with brush strokes of pure unfiltered texture.
〰️ Gladstone park 〰️
This can sometimes be something that happens with me and my work, I get so in the zone and have this pin precise tunnel vision of getting stuff done that I don’t take a step back, look and see if I am answering the question that this world is asking. When I was in uni I was modelling a car, I remember distinctly Alan Postings coming up to me and saying “the way that you are thinking is a problem” I needed to hear it because it was, the car was looking like shit because I was clouded by just getting it done. I always think it’s good to remind yourself if this piece is doing it’s job by asking those questions and using everything in your kit of tricks to get it that way – it is something I am getting used of catching and making the necessary steps to remedy, I think intuition gets better with age.
With this in mind I used another trick up my sleeve, my tried and true – alpha maps. I love alpha maps because they are like smoke and mirrors, a magic trick to the eye. Old school video games would use alpha maps to bulk out the background of a scene where the player isn’t supposed to go, so why use resource heavy plethoras of polygons when you can do the same job with just one piece of geometry? Thats the mentality I like to use when making these ambitions worlds in my head a reality, reeling them back to smoke and mirrors to make it look right but at a fraction of the time and when it comes to it – cost.
Making these alpha maps is simple, I used a single continuous line brush stroke painted in photoshop – 1 with colour and 1 with just back and white, then apply that to the geometry of the Trees and what’s lovely is because the geometry is a mound the alpha map wraps around it, it is always a pleasant surprise to see how it turns out! What it gave me was a lot of texture – a single brush stroke that looks imperfect, less CG and more true to nature. It also aloud other flora to peep through and behind it which rings true for my own excursion to Gladstone park.
〰️Old Tree Texture Test 〰️
Brush Stroke with Colour
Brush Stroke Alpha Map
〰️New texture with Alpha map added〰️
Because I like that this world is teetering more into the illustrative side I am going to have to dial up the same illustrative style with the other worlds – The Metropolis and The Wastelandso that it all feels cohesive and that they do belong on one single planet – more on how that plays out later…
I was also really inspired by two artists that are also apart of my kit for this project (And many more that is on my ever growing Pinterest board) – Eyvind Earle and Marie-Laure Cruschi, Earles pieces are these stunning whimsical landscapes with a vivid, palpable colour palette, Cruschi’s pieces are these gorgeous illustrations with the plant life in these universes having chunks missing to show a lot of shapely charm.
Eyvind Earle
Marie Laure Cruschi
Now that I understand how the Oasis will look I just need to continue to place the plant life on a shot by shot basis, and finally getting onto opening excel and planning out those shots. ONWARDS 〰️
Gentle Giant 