That was 25 June to 1 July 2017.
As feared, this week completely wiped me out and left little time for making the funnies. To top it all off, it’s very cold and rainy this weekend.
But I got a little bit done. Here’s a work in progress pyramid worshipper. This little person is a replacement for the stick figure from the original part of the shot. (I think I might have another shot at making the triangle.)
Next week should be less hectic and see the completion of Shot 2. See you then!
Welcome to what was 18 to 24 June 2017. Scene 2 has begun in earnest. This scene establishes level of general silliness.
AAAAA runs past a mild-mannered cube with such force that the cube gets violently lathed into a pyramid. The pyramid is roused from its dizziness by a pyramid worshipper that’s arrived from nowhere. The pyramid does not know what to think about this.
Here’s the first attempt:
It’s a beginning, but there’s definitely room for improvement. (Mainly I’m thinking “How would this scene unfold if Terry Gilliam were directing it?”)
The little worshipper doesn’t instantly read as a worshipper. The audience needs to be able to recognise the character instantly for the shot to work because everything happens so quickly. I showed it to a workmate and they confused the worshipper for AAAAA himself!
To fix this, I’m going to switch the stick figure out for a small group of monk-like characters instead. Monks are obviously there to worship something, moreso if they have little pyramids on their robes and if they’re wearing pyramid hats so it’s obvious that they’re pyramid monks. Sound will definitely help with making the gag work too.
Meanwhile, the day job is ramping up again for an emergency project and I just took delivery of four DIY synthesiser kits from Befaco which I’m itching to put together. If I still deliver this shot despite all that, I’d consider that quite the win!
If you’ve got any other feedback on this shot, please do me the honour of leaving a comment. 🙂
It’s been 4 to 10 June 2017. Things have turned chilly here. We were forecast for 9 degrees overnight on Friday morning and got 1.6C instead because the rain we were expecting didn’t pan out. Brrr! Still, Perth winters are pretty bearable once the overnight cold goes away. Like the sound of 25 degree fine winter days? Perth has you covered.[1]
Meanwhile, the new movie project has something to look at. Last weekend was a three dayer so I rigged the title character and sketched out some animation. Here’s “Take 1” of shot 01, featuring the central anarchist of the piece:
It’s promising but a long way from where I want it to be. I wonder if it all goes by a little bit too quick, not letting the character’s weird/cheeky nature shine through enough. There’s some undeniably good stuff in there too – the goofy run at the end feels spot on. Then there’s points of ambivalence – maybe the zippier pacing is what I should aim for? And should I stick with the snappy stepped animation?
I’ve got some of my own notes to work through and I’ll see where I end up by the end of next week. But what do YOU think, dear reader? 🙂
[1] Of course the flipside of this year-round sunny weather is being short on water. The Water Corporation both desalinates the Indian Ocean and recycles our sewage into drinkable water because there’s nowhere near enough rain to fill our dams anymore. Yay.
It’s been 2 to 8 April 2017. I got a new semi-modular synthesiser this week so I lost a couple of evenings to playing with the new toy adding to the RYG-O soundtrack.
For this week’s shots I moved away from procedural meshes and back to working with lots of duplicated objects. I made a spiral galaxy, swarms of weird little swimming eggs, swarms of psychedelic kidneys and swarms of little balls having arguments with one another.
One of the useful discoveries I made this week was figuring out that I could parent objects to other objects as part of Animation Nodes. The node setup for parenting is even pretty simple.
I used parenting to create the galaxy shot. I started with a spiral-making loop I made on Sunday. I created three sets of spiral objects with different colours of spiral and different sizes of blob. I parented each spiral to a different empty and set the empties spinning, then parented those empties to a master empty which moved them across the screen. Initially all three spiral bits were parented to one empty, but everything rotating at the same rate was dull to look at. It helped a lot to experiment with the rotation using empties as a guide instead of having to maths it.
Also this week I found out that constant updating can be switched off. This is useful when working with thousands of duplicated objects at once. The spiral was slowing my computer down pretty badly.
Over to the swimmy eggs now. Each of the eggs swims towards the top of the screen at a randomised rate which is peculiar to that egg. Of course, when certain aquatic animals like jellyfish or octopodes propel themselves through the water, there’s a push forward then a lag as the “water” absorbs its momentum.
To mimic this, I added a couple of sine functions to make things more interesting – one controls the compression and expansion of the eggs’ shape, and the other offsets to the position to make the motion speed up and slow down. The two sine functions are out of phase – they both have a period of 12 frames, but they reach their respective extremes at different points. The actual node structure that makes this possible is a bit hard to follow, but this is the node setup I used to figure out how to tweak it so that it not only fit the swimming action but the beat of the soundtrack.
Here the complexity of the maths and node tree is kept away from where I have to think about it, and that’s how it should be.
The psychedelic kidney swarm was made possible thanks to Omar Ahmad’s excellent write-up on transformation matrices in AN. I’d wanted to get the eggs swimming in different directions, and that meant having them turn to whichever direction they were headed in. I was getting nowhere with that on Thursday night, but finding Omar’s tutorials inspired me to give it another try on Friday night. Even though I couldn’t get the kidneys to change rotation/direction mid-swim, I did manage to get them turned to face the direction that they’re swimming in a straight line.
Here’s a more presentable version of the swimming trick, where timeOffset (can be positive or negative) is added to the Time input of “Animate Vector” to move the kidney from A to B.
Finally a word about materials! I have been using randomised colours a lot in RYG-O and that means using the Object Info node’s Random output a lot. The problem is that Random only outputs a single random number and I need three (hue, saturation and value) to make an entire colour.
To turn a random number into an entire random vector, I follow the Random output with multiply, modulo and add nodes before they hit Combine HSV. Multiply stretches the incoming range by an arbitrary amount to introduce a little bit more randomness. Modulo clamps the output of multiply to a particular upper limit, effectively setting a range from 0 to the modulo amount. Add offsets that output upward and sets a minimum.
For instance, in the following node setup, my random colours will have saturation between 0.6 (add 0.6) and 0.8 (modulo 0.2 + add 0.6), and values between 0.5 (add 0.5) and 0.8 (modulo 0.3 + add 0.5).
The quantiseHue group does a modulo, multiply, round and divide operation to quantise any random number input to 0.0 (red), 0.166 (yellow), 0.333 (green), 0.5 (cyan), 0.667 (blue), 0.833 (magenta) or 1 (red again). That’s how I’m sticking to my assigned colours. 🙂
That’s all for this week. See you at Easter!
Here’s an image from the new story reel, done entirely with Blender’s recently upgraded Grease Pencil, and a behind the scenes screenshot.
A planning process like this is different to going between Krita and Blender. There’s no need to do scene numbering or other stuff ahead of time to get filenames, for a start – I’m just drawing on different layers as I go. Each time I want to change a shot, I just blank out or redraw all the layers.
And yes, it’s in colour. Which is also new. 🙂
That green strip in the Video Sequence Editor is the scene I’m drawing in. The purple chunks above the green strip are the old storyboards. Wherever there’s a gap in that strip, I have to draw new art.
To render out the story reel with grease pencil, I have to use the OpenGL render button in the VSE panel. (The OpenGL render button in the 3D View only renders the scene. Big thanks to Olson and JA12 on #blender for patiently helping me suss that out.)
Back to it then!