Final - Sound Design

Abstract:

I entered this project originally as a modeler, but given the abundance of modelers in our group I ran out of work to do quickly.  As a result I took on a task that we hadn't even thought about previously: sound design.  Having sound in this animation brings the final product much closer to a completed, professional project.  The addition of the sound makes the animation a little bit more lifelike, since it allows the audience to feel a bit more immersed in the environment.  To achieve this, I used the software instruments in Logic Pro and sound samples from freesound.org.

Planning:

Prior to beginning any work on this, I spoke with Kevin about musical direction and he said jazz, to reflect the semi-imaginary setting our animation takes place in.  Other than this, the entirety of the planning depended on the animation.  I would have to match up sound samples to certain visual cues, and the mood of the music to the events taking place.  This took some studying of the story itself to ensure that it meshed well together.

Production Log:

The bulk of the sound design can't be done until the final animation is rendered.  This is needed to correctly sync up the timing of the audio and video events.  Since I began the sound design well before the final animation was complete, I began by writing some music in Logic to use.  As I wrote the music, I showed it to Kevin to get his feedback.  This resulted in a lot of music that ended up being scrapped for the scene I was working on.  This was helpful, however, because I ended up with a lot of music to choose from for the other scenes by the end.  All the music was done with midi software instruments, which I programmed in the piano roll.

We found a way to get the movie without spending the time rendering it using the Powerblaster tool.  This exports a video of what the camera view looks like before rendering.  Using this I started to add sound effects for the events taking place.  Since I started with the last scene, all I needed was some ambient city noises, party noises, and a kiss sound.  The ambient sound was easy as I could simply drop in the file and loop it if necessary. The kiss sample was a bit more difficult.  The only sample I could find was very short, and the kiss in the animation was a lot longer.  To fix this I used the sample editor to extend the duration of one part of the sample to make it line up.  I also changed the pitch of the sound because the original was too high and sounded a bit cartoonish.

The rest of the animation was done very similarly.  I used the music that I had written earlier and just edited to fit the time.  I used the same ambient noises, which were long enough to fill the entire time they were needed without looping.  The other samples I added were for the can being kicked, the door being slammed shut, and the curtains being drawn.  I edited these in the same ways as the kiss sample to get the sound to match the actions.  The can sound consisted of two samples: a beer can being tossed into a recycling bin, and another can rolling on a floor.  I lined them up so the can bounced then rolled, and edited the bounces so that they would line up.

Throughout the process I was editing the mix of the sounds, to ensure that volumes were appropriate and that no sounds clipped, which causes audio distortion.  After this I adjusted the automation, which means adjusting volume and panning (left and right) in relation to time.  This adds to the realism of the final product as it makes it seem as though the sounds are coming from a certain direction or from a distance.  Finally, I exported it to a .wav file, which we would later bring into Final Cut Pro, and edit together with the final animation.

Conclusion:

The result is a combination of music and sound collage that - I think - adds a lot to the final animation.  Everything with this was reasonably successful.  I was able to find the samples and create the music I need, and get everything to line up and mesh together well.

Self Evaluation:

While I am very happy with the final results, I believe this could have been a bit better.  The result I've gotten sounds very good, but I don't think its quite professional quality.  I wish I could have spent more time working on the music, and I think that some of the edits could have been more exact.  Also, since I was limited to free samples, the samples I got were all of various qualities coming from differing recording techniques.  I'm sure professionally made sample packages would be much higher quality, or more suiting.  In some places, I feel that the samples did not quite match the sound of what they were representing, but I had to use them because they were all that was available.  In a perfect world, I'd have the time and resources to make my own samples to use, then I could avoid payment, copyright issues, and quality issues.  Overall, I'm happy with my work, but there is still room for improvement.

Final - Texturing

I was responsible for all of the texturing besides the car, fountain, and the floor and walls of the interior. I also did a majority of the UVs and did a small amount of modeling and scene building.

My general process for texturing was as follows:
- Upon first receiving a model, I open up the UV Texture editor. If the model was already textured I'd skip ahead and export it to Photoshop if it had not been UVs or I deemed the UVs too wonky to texture, I would UV map it
- Assuming the model was not UV'd (like many)Generally, I'd first start off with an automatic mapping in order to get the UVs to vaguely resemble the object. Normally it looks like a bunch of cut up pieces and you use this as your starting point.
- The next thing I'd do is to turn border edges on so you can more easily see where the seams in the UV are.
- The next step is to stitch the edges together. Keep in mind that your goal when you stitches the edges of faces together, isn't to stitch together as many seams as possible, but to create seams that make the model easy to paint on.
- Another consideration is to make sure that there are not large discrepancies in face shape on the model versus the UV. If the faces are either too big or too small on the UV or model, it will make the texture appear wonky. The resolution of a texture does not change to fit the faces of UV's so you need to make sure that the size of faces in the UV's reflects the size on the actual model.
- The next thing you need to do is to export the UV map. You need to decide how detailed this object needs to be and therefore the resolution of the UV map. When you export it, make sure to also change the file type to whatever you want to import into Photoshop. Using .tif normally works well.
- Paint the UV in Photoshop. Don't forget to turn the UV map layer off before you save it. You don't want the lines to appear on your model.
- Click and drag the .tif file into Maya's hypershade. Assign it to the color of whatever material you need for the object and you're done.

Largely, I think the group did well in pulling together so many different necessary parts of this project and producing as close to a finished project as was possible in the time frame given to us.

In regards to my personal portion of it, I think that I did a decent job. A lot of the textures I couldn't devote as much time to as I would have liked but due to time constraints I did what I could. In future projects I think there needs to be more fusion between the modeling and UV'ing aspects. Going back and having to edit aspects of models and/or remap UVs wastes a lot of time. I feel like modelers need experience texturing, even if they're not good at it so they can take into consideration the UVs and the textures when they're building the models.

Some pictures of scenes with some stuff that I textured:
(Textures: Rags, Little Girl, floor, window, wall)



(Textures: squirrel, flower, trashcan, cans, boxes, walls, doors)



(Textures: Rags, windows, boxes, trash cans, cans, window, door, buildings, floor, lamp)


(Textures: generic men, floor, flower, fire hydrant, window, walls, doors)


(Textures: generic men, floor, lamps, steps, buildings, doors, windows)


*There were 13 different variations for the buildings and windows and 4 different variations of the generic man.


Here are some other props that I don't think were in the scenes above and were not in my midterm post.

Final: Setting up the Setting

One of my tasks was to prop the scene. It involved importing buildings and other scenery objects and creating the city streets. It went through a lot of iterations and I cannot find all of them due to folders on the SOAC occasionally being wiped, but here is one of the earlier experiments.

Clearly there were problems with what would happen when the cameras looked down any street and it ended in nothingness. The current version fixes that issue by putting another street in front of the street.

 Because the group worked on things jointly, someone took the street set-up I had and made it better. The street pictured above and the crisscrossing walls (to get rid of gaps, presumably) are not mine. I circled things I recall doing below: placing stoplights, plants, benches, and fire hydrants. The fountain is also mine.

Final: Modeling the Building, updated

Recap: for reference/inspiration, I used this picture of a 1920s-ish city street:

I sketched some quick boxes and settled on a 3 story building where the first floor would appear as a shop front with one large decorative and the second and third are apartments, with smaller plain windows.
I started with some generic shape as the base.

From the initial look, it changed to a building (dubbed "the restaurant") with awnings over the window and door:

Some features of the restaurant came and went. At some point we were planning on having a scene inside. For this I made a box inside the first floor and textured carpet and wallpaper on. Then I had to work on making the window transparent. This particular way of making the interior scene was scrapped in favor of some easier method where we could just use a PNG of the exterior to give the illusion of outdoors.

When it was finally time to import the building into the scene, it had to be scaled, rendering my original textures useless. But that's okay, because Greg's are better anyway. Some of the unnecessary faces were deleted to save on render time. The final street scene looks like this:

Final: Animation

The animation of Rags, was completed by Kevin and myself. We divided the tasks for each of the five scenes, on occasion helping each other.

Scene 1
Animator: Seth Konoza
Responsibilities: scene setup, Generic Men animation, Lady Red animation, Curtain animation



Scene 2
Animator: Kevin Monaghan
Responsibilities: scene setup, Rags animation

Animator: Seth Konoza
Responsibilities: Squirrel animation, Generic Men animation




Scene 3
Animator: Kevin Monaghan
Responsibilities: scene setup, Rags animation, flower animation, Car animation

Animator: Seth Konoza
Responsibilities: Generic Men animation, Car animations

Kevin and I both worked on the car animations and we both tweaked each others animations in this scene. We both believe the chase scene was the most grueling and demanding out of all the scenes.



Scene 4
Animator: Kevin Monaghan
Responsibilities: scene setup, Rags animation, Generic Men animation, Lady Red animation



Scene 5
Animator: Kevin Monaghan
Responsibilities: scene setup, Rags animation, Lil' Girl animation

Animator: Seth Konoza
Responsibilities: Generic Men animation



Pictures from animation process:

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 5

Secondary Character Animation

I have finally started helping with the animation for the short film. I have been working on the secondary characters in the scenes.

The first is the squirrel in the second scene:


Another scene I helped in was the generic characters walking in the last scene:

Texturing

My primary role in this project thus far has been doing UVs and texturing. It's a simple but time consuming role. UV's probably take up as much or more time than the actual texturing. It's impossible to texture anything properly if the UVs don't make any sense so I make sure to take my time (with most of them). I've also had to change some UVs that other group mates did in order to make them easier to texture. The reason that the UVs were built a bit strange was probably due to the group members not being overly familiar with texturing so they were not really thinking about the overall purpose of the UV. (Which is to create surfaces that are easy to paint on.) When you UV, your goal isn't to stitch as many faces together as possible but to create shapes that actually resemble what you're painting (so that you can actually paint it.) Another point is that you need to be sure there are enormous differences in face size on the model versus the face size of the UV. It will cause your texture to stretch and look wonky. One last (and rather obvious) thing to remember is not to put seems in obvious place like across the front of a jacket where you need the texture to be uniform. Stick to trying to keep your seems on hard edges and hard to see places.

Box 1/2 UV + Texture:



Fire Hydrant UV + Texture:




Lamp UV + Texture:




Garbage Can UV + Texture:




Lady Red Texture:

Environment: Building a Restaurant

My next task for the short film was to work on the buildings for the city. I had two designs in mind: one generic building we could recolor and line the streets with, and the restaurant. The restaurant is significant because it's where the story starts and ends so it should get to be unique.

I made a generic base to model them from, a polygon with 3 faces to each side.

The generic building

The restaurant.

The restaurant was considered more important so I spent time texturing it first. I liked the look of building in the picture below, it felt kind of elegant to me and the restaurant is supposed to be a classy establishment where Rags sees the Lady in Red.

Exterior

Bottom front. The window is transparent.

I tried to texture transparency onto the window; at the moment it is completely invisible, but I think there may be a way to solve it that doesn't involve revamping the whole model. The transparency is done by using black, white and presumably shades of grey.

The transparency map. It is not very impressive at the moment.

The white of the map are the opaque parts and the black is transparent. So here, the black rectangle is the part that is the window pane. I think if I find the right shade of grey, I can get a transparent piece that is still slightly visible instead of an empty frame.

The interior

More interior. Here is the door from the inside.

The interior is actually a box inside the main building. I did it this way because I wasn't sure how we would be able to texture the inside part to look like a room if they were part of the same piece.

Character modeling: Squirrel

My first job for the project was to create the character of the squirrel. I started doodling them in class a lot and my initial ideas involved trying to imagine a squirrel standing in the T position.

It was kind of scary.

Then I started using simple shapes and decided that the squirrel should have a fat body with stubby little arms and feet.

From this I have learned that squirrels are weird.

These are the sketches I made for a reference as modeling.

His final design is round and soft, like a plush toy.

 

I start my modeling process with polygons and I build half the model because he's going to be symmetrical. The Extrude command is what I use most frequently, in addition to moving individual edges/vertices/faces where I think is necessary.

When I have all the necessary pieces laid out, I delete a few faces, combine the different polygons, and merge the vertices together. It's important to make sure you have the same number of vertices on each piece.

In the process of combining: one face was deleted from each before combining. The combined pieces can now have their vertices merged.

A finished merge. This is the inside of the arm.

Mirrored and smoothed.

The UVs

Car Model Progress

So far, the modeling for the first car is complete and the second car is not far behind.  On the first car, Kevin added windows and I added a grill. I also have the UV mapping mostly complete.

The second car was built by modifying the body dimensions and making a new grill.

Animation Begins!

Animation has begun. The only character that was ready for animation, both rigging and texturing, was Rags. So the scene's completed were the second scene to the eighth, where he first finds the flower and see's the squirrel run off with it. The camera is set up for the squirrels introduction though the squirrel is currently absent from the actual scene. In addition all scenes following the twentieth till the end have been completed regarding Rags and the camera work. Like the squirrel, all characters other than Rags have not yet been added to the scenes. In working with this animation we have discovered three key flaws to Rags design. A) For a character who has to do a lot of running, he has very stubby legs. Thus we have decided to change camera angles to stay away from his feet. 2) Rags' eyes disappear inside his face when he turns, this has been fixed. Finally, IV) Rigs' bow-tie, like his eyes, would disappear when he turned. Like the eyes this has been fixed.