3DFP 2016 - Conceptualization

3DFP 2016 - Conceptualization 1/2

Milan M.

Pitch Ideas

1. <<Mission Nursing Home>> RED and BLUE are two World War 2 veteran's who have been friends for ages and even as kids they were inseparable. Due to recent decline in BLUE'S health he has been put in a nursing home, which is something he hates cause he feels like he is in a prison. BLUE and RED come up with a plan and they go to extreme meassures to put this plan into play.

Style:

Story takes place in our time were these two are in their 80's - 90's just to make it more interesting. I want this short story to be a blend of "badass", hilariously funny and more to it then meets the eye. While idea of the story is that, no matter how old you get so things stay with you for the rest of your life and in these guys case, they kept their childish foolishness and imagination you might say. 

These are same of the examples i had in mind for my characters and the type of short animation i had in mind for this story:

And this guy from a animation movie i saw couple years back while i was attending class at Noroff i belief it's from a short animation movie called "Geri's game" or something like that.

The PLOT

An Old man sits in his wheel chair looking at the old photo reminiscing memories of the past, the man is called Blue an military  veteran of world war 2. 

He spends most of his days in his room at the Nursery home since he got sick. 

Blue throws the picture on his bed and looks out the window in pure envy of those young people who walk and run pass his Nursing home. 

He's been doing that ever since he moved in the Nursing home, he misses his childhood friend Red. They have been inseperable since they were kids, Blue laughs at a memory from the past when Blue threw eggs at Mrs. Weiman's house and blamed it on Red.

Blue shakes his head out of the dream and picks up the phone and dials in Red's number.

Blue and Red conjure a plan to get Blue out of the nursing home just for the night before he loses his mind.

Later that day Blue prepares everything for the escape and waits for Red to call on the phone when hes ready outside.

 Phone rings and Blue takes his jacket on and grabs his walking chair and heads for the exits.

Close to the exit Blue gets stopped by one of the nurses asking where he was heading, Blue stops and slowley turns and replies to the nurse that hes going for some fresh air and to stretch his legs abit.

Another nurse who has been bribed by Red replies that Blue is going for a short walk with a friend.

Blue steps outside with his walking chair and walks towards Red car. (like a badass with badass music in his head but in reality hes walking really show with his chair stroller).

When Blue gets to the car he asks Red if he can drive since he hasn't driven a  car for long time and Red let's him.

Blue unsure of his driving skills crashes the car in the first tree right next to the Nursing home and ruins the getaway.

FIN

2. <<Thief>> A careless man has been a subject to several thief attacks from most unsuspected character. Man didn't put too much thought a first but it was getting out of hand and he had to do something!

Style:

I was thinking about using same type of animation style in this story as in the previous one. The idea came from this short animation movie i saw long ago i can't remember the name but that story was abit different and it kinda took a different turn then i expected. So i came up with my own story with a man fighting an animal who has been harrassing his estates and its getting out of hand and he has to do something about it. The animal i had in mind here would be a badger at first i wasn't too sure i was thinking through the different ideas for an animal but everytime i came back to the badger or a weasel. I guess Badgers have always been portayed as thiefs in cartoons and animation movies, so why not!? Guess the idea i was going for here was something like DreamWorks Madagascar i guess with some mixture of Ice Age maybe.

Here is the kinda style i was looking for:

The PLOT

It all start one evening when "_____" takes out the trash just before going to sleep.

As the man was going up the stairs he hears noice coming from the trash like someone is going through it.

"_____" opens up the curtains and flashes with flashlight towards the trash and see's nothing. 

"Enter Badger" Badger hide behind this thin tree while "___" was looking out with the flashlight.

Badger find nothing usefull so he instead decides to steal mans tool box from the garage.

Next day man wakes up prepare breakfast and goes out to see what that noise from yesterday was.

Outside he find the trash everywhere and there track going from the trash to the garage so the man walks to the garage and looks around.

Apperantly his tool box is missing and he looks around see maybe he misplaced it somewhere. 

"___" having little time decides to just ignore it and look for it later because he has to go soon to work and he still needs to eat.

Just when the man walked in the house the badger strikes again stealing mans shoes which were standing just next to the entrance door.

"____" going to work lock up the house and just when he was about to leave he notiices that his shoes that he uses for work are missing now too.

He looks around thinking neigbour kids might be pulling pranks on him just ignores it yet again and leaves for work.

Badger appears yet again with an oppertunity to steal more stuff from "____" grabs everything in its path.

Later that day when "____" came home most of the tools in his garage were missing including the front porch wooden chairs, "____" is getting worried now and is thinking about calling the cops to report this but doesnt.

Badger from a distance watches the man and laughs, thinking he could get away with much more.

Late at night "___" hears the same noices again and looks around the estate and see's the badger and thinks the noise from the other day was that same badger but didnt suspect him of being the one stealing everything.

"____" goes to bed but he wakes up in the middle of the night hearing moving noices and knocking but he doesn't do anything about he just goes straight to bed again. 

Early in the morning "___" get woken up by someone dragging the quilt off him and taking his pillow.

"___"  looks around the room it's been emptied out there is nothing but his bed quilt and pillow in the room and this strange creature dragging the quilt away from him.

"___" realizing whats going on starts pulling back the quilt out of Badgers hands but the badgers doesnt give in. Eventually the badgers take both his quilt and the pillow laughing.

THE END

(This is the part where i had in mind a scene from Badgers layer sitting confortably in "___" chair watching his TV with all of "___" stuff around in badgers layer.)

Post-apocalyptic City tutorial assestment

Post-apocalyptic City tutorial assestment 

by

Milan Maric

Part 1:

Introduction into the tutorial is great, pretty easy to follow and the pictures help alot since the options hes applying are "selected" making it much easier. The more tricky or "complex" should i say executions are explained more in detail to the point where you could blindfoldly follow the tutorial. However one thing i reacted to was that he wasn't showing how his render options were setup at start, cause i tried to do the first part of the tutorial my self and i kept getting different resaults.
One thing thats nice was the part with "Partical View" where he explained basically what each option did or how it worked. I personally have barely touched the particle viewer yet i could easily follow up. Same as me he encountered problems which he adressed and provided the solutions each step of the way through the first part of the tutorial! 
This scene isn't that easy to make nor is it beginner friendly but this student did a great job at simplifying it down frankly there isnt much else to say for the first part other then job well done!

Part 2:

I didn't do part 2 since i don't have After Effects but same here as the first part complete followthrough throu the whole procedure to the point. One thing worth mentioning back at the ending of part one he was rendering out elements, i don't know how its on others 3dmax but i was missing some options for "render elements" and i can't see if he provided the support files for this. Anyways back to the AE part i notice straight away he was providing full screen screenshots which don't really help much, he should have zoomed in on the options and maybe even highlighted the options he was clicking on. I can't say much about part two but i imagine i'd get lost along the way. Nothing much else to say but overall it is a great tutorial which is easy to follow (atleast throught he part1) there were some parts that weren't so clear but nothing to fuss much about. In the end he also explains how you could increase the quality and the details if you feel like it, so yeah for a beginner im impressed!

Project 09 - Post-Production

Volumetric light tutorial
(for indoor scenes)

I'm going to show you how to prepare the lights enviroment in your scene which you can reuse and adjust in the future. Since most people like my self hate to keep adjusting the scene lights and being all fickery about it. It is just amazing how much time this consumes and can cost you even more if your not prepared, so having an pre-made scene set up where you can just bring in your work and give it some small adjustments can save you alot time. So let's just right into it, follow this tutorial to the letter and you will be fine! :)

So before you do anything you wanna hit f10 on your keyboard and change to mental ray render if it's not already set to that by default. Or if you havent done this befor you can simply go to your tool bar on the top, click Rendering and go on Render Setup this will open up a new window, F10 is basically the shortcut for the Render Setup tab.



In the "Common" Tab head down to "Assign Renderer" open that tab under "Production" you want to click on the "choose render" and assign Mentalray as your new renderer. With that done you can start with the first step of the tutorial!

1.1 First create or bring in your room scene.

 

Scene out of the way we can continue on adding improvements to our scene.
1.2 Add a target camera a adjust it how ever you want. (note your scene needs to be in a room with windows in order to benefit from any enviroment lights).


1.3 Go to you "Create" tab and click on the Lights in order to add "skylight" to you scene and you don't need to worry where to position it, cause it affects the whole scenary no matter where you place it.



1.4 Next you want to go to same create tab and back to lights however instead of "standard" change the tab option to "Photometric" cause we want to add "Sky Portal". Once you have done that you need to position the "Sky Portal" near a window of your scene with the Sky Portal facing in towards your scene as shown on the picture on the right.


 
1.5 While were working on the "Sky Portal" you might wanna go in to the Modify tab one next to "create" and adjust the "shadow samples" from 16 to 32. This is something you will change depending what your happy with but im going to keep it at 32 for now.

1.6 Now that were done with Sky Portal press (F10) and instead of Common tab switch to "GB" which stands for Global Illumination.

 

What i want you to do next is head over to the "final gathering" and i want you to increase the "Diffuse bounce" to 2. Next scroll down to "Photon Mapping", enable it and increase the maximum Photons per samle to 40k. What that's gonna do is increase how the light is gonna bounce off certain object just like it does in real life. Once you have done that you can just turn of the "Render setup" tab and press (F9) to run a render from your cam view. Whats going to happen next is that your window area is going to show black and your light won't bounce as intended for various reasons which we will adresse.

1.7 Hit (8) which is the shortcut for "Enviroment and Effects" tab, there i want you to go to background and change the color from standard black to a light blue.



1.8 Next go to your "Material editor" you can either go to your tool bar at top of your 3d max or you can simple push "M". Next i want you to add a new material call it whatever you want. Go down "specular highlights" and increase the specular level to (11) and glossiness if its low set it to 10. Next go to your "Maps" and click on "diffuse" and add plug in an "ambient/reflection occlusion" should be one of the top plugs under mental ray.

 
Under mental ray add the Ambient/Reflective Occlussion.


 

Click on the "bright" and change the color to light orange, on "Samples" change it to 32 and on "max distance" set it to (1) and hit (F9) to render to see if the changes have improved the scene and if everything is correct it should look like something like this:

 



If your scene looks something close those this then it means your doing something right and continue on with the next steps, if not go back and see if you maybe missed out on something and redo the render.
1.9 Adding direct light to the scene for extra light details and putting in an extra realistic feel to the scene. Go to Create tab and click on the Light tab a gain and switch it back to "Standard" and find "target direct". Now position the Direct target light towards the window you want the light to eminate from so you get the light effect through those windows.



You want the direct light to go through your scene but it all depends on how you want to put the light. Next click on the light and go to the modify tab and adjust the "hotspot and the fall off" you will have to adjust that your self. See what works for your scene cause it all depends on how large your scene is. Also befor we go to the next step, turn  on your Shadows and change it to "ray traced shadows" so you don't get pixelated shadows since were using the mental ray render.

1.10 Now were gonna add that direct late in to our "atmosphere" so hit (8) again to bring up our Enviroment and effects tab. Scroll down to atomosphere and click on "ADD" and add the Volum light.



When your done with that select that "Volume light" in the atmosphere effects and scroll down to the "Volume light parameters" and change the "attenuation color" to yellowish or how you want it really. Next go to density and put the amount you want but the idea is the small the scene the bigger the number which in my case my scene was pretty average so i have it on (375). Other thing you want to adjust is "Max Light %" and thats the plug that's gonna define how intense your beam of volume light is gonna be, i had mine on 5% and worked from there until i got it right. This is not something that you can just randomly pick you gotta keep tunning it and eventually you'll get it right!
Lastly turn on the noise which is basically the dust particals which are gonna get pick up by the volume light. You know those small particals you see flying around on a sunny day in your house only see when shined on by a sun beam? Yeah those rascals anyways you don't really need to ficker around the setting you just need to turn it on but if your really fickery about it you go right ahead!

(NOTE) Ive bumped into couple problems with my light beams not being correctly rendered due to wrong options on the shadow filters. Instead of getting real life looking light beams, i was getting jagged edged lights which can be easily fixed simple by going into the "Enviroment and effects" (press 8). Once your there scroll down and select your Volume light and scroll further down until you get to "Filter shadows" and if you getting this problem it should be on "use light SMP range" instead of that put it on High and close the tab. That should fix the problem now just do a quick low quality render if everything is sorted out your good to go!

 

2.1 With pretty much everything set for final render there is still alot stuff you could do to make your scene even better including using Photoshop as a "cherry on a muffin" if you will. But thats something thats up to each one of you to attempt but not really needed. However next step will be adding in more samples for a better render so, head over to your sky portal and select it. Head over to your "Modify" tab and increase the shadow samples on your Sky portal to 64 or more, the more you add the longer will the render take.. keep that in mind.



2.2 Now we want to add more samples to our render so press (F10) to bring up the render setup, first go to (Global illumination) and make sure your skylight mode is set to "skylight illumination from IBL". Next go to "Renderer"  and under the Sampling Mode set quality to what ever you want but put "Minimum" to (4) and "Maximum" to (128) and close the tab.



2.3 Congratulation, you are now ready to render your scene the only thing left now is to press (F9) and chill back while your render finishes and you should end up with something like this.



This is not in best quality, you could do much more if you play around with the options. However this is basically to show you the way to light up your scene and put more off a "human touch" to the scene!

Project 8 PreViz

Project 8

Pre-Viz

Project 08 Previsualization:

Previsualization also know as pre-rendering, preview or wireframe windows is a function to visualize complex scenes in a movie before filming. It is also a concept in still photography. Previsualization is applied to techniques such as storyboarding, either in the form of charcoal drawn sketches or in digital technology in the planning and conceptualization of movie scenery.

Previsualization allow directors to experiment with different staging and art direction options, such as lighting, camera placement and movement, stage direction and editing without any cost increases to the actual production. Previsualization can add music, sound effect and dialogue to closely emulate the look of fully produced and edited sequences and are most encountered in scenes that involves special effects.

 Production

Scene:

Started creating the scene for the pre-viz based on my animatic story but before that i had to decide which scene i was going to make since i had a lot of different scenes in my storyboard. I started making the first scene simply because i liked it more then the other once and i kinda had figured out where i was going with the scene. So i designed the street, houses and the main house which was more detailed then rest of them. 

I didn't give to much attention to the rest of the street as to the main house which the main character was living in, simply because the cameras weren't going to show too much of the background. 

Camera:

I have already worked on other animation project and were used to the camera angles and how to position them however i have never gone too much into it when it comes to lenses. That's about the only thing i don't know much about since we didn't get into it with the teacher. But from what i understood you use the different lenses based on the distance between the camera and the object  your recording.

Editing:

Since this was just a pre-viz i didn't put in too much information in the animation movements but just enough to kinda hint as to what the character is doing. However i have so many ideas how to improve but i couldn't add them all in the pre-viz. Besides having render errors and rigs not getting animated for some weird reason i was struggling with getting this done in time. 

Instead of putting 2 scene's in the pre-viz like i planned i went for one however the  first scene is suppose to be during the early morning and is suppose to be dark. But since i was struggling with the render i cut that out, but i'm still gonna use that later on. 

The street and rest of the neighborhood houses are in minimum details simply because they aren't in the camera angle and you wont see them so there was no point. But i just made it in case i wanted to change something. I also had to change the Rig since the one i was using seemed to be bugged or something which i later on found out to be bugging cause i was resizing the rig. And the other thing was that i didn't merge the files correctly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A074IXCePMI&feature=youtu.be

Evaluation:

I'm not so satisfied with the project due the problems i had where i had to cut out half of the animation i had intended to send. Also the video or the preview went kinda too fast cause i didn't tweak it well enough on the timeline. The camerawork was fine could be better also the lens sizes could have probably helped the animation. As for the scenery i think its good enough for a pre-viz, you don't really need anything better then that atleast for a pre-viz!

UPDATE

UPDATE:

Posting some new side projects i have been working on for the fun of it and some for a friend who needed new tabs for Twitch stream. I also have some drawings that i'm gonna post soon as i deliver the project i'm currently working on. :)

Project 7 2D Animatic

Project 7

2D Animatic

Introduction:

So in this project I was suppose to make another storyboard as a 2D Animatic. Why do I say "Storyboard", well it's because a 2D Animatic is basically a storyboard just with few twists. I was also suppose to find music and sounds for the Animatic and also show asset movement by arrow or animated elements within the frame. Using images, texts and links to other animation fims i am suppose to show benefits of a 2d Animatic so here it is!

2D animatics is used to estabilish pacing of the movie, music preliminary recorded dialogs and sounds effects may also be included where appropriate to enhance details. Animatic may be little more then temporary arranged storyboard and it may give information about movement of objects (assets) and the camera. Animatic is where sound clips and voiceover are added and motion is introduced to characters. This method can be created quickly for a specific video and the work of the projects can evenly be distributed throughout process making everything so much easier. BUT it can also waste alot of the time if not done correctly! It is important to have a good vision of what you want to create, the audience you want to reach with it and the goals you wish to reach as those choices influence the decisions what to create!

Production:

So i started with my first drawing from the final storyboard where the camera is positioned outside the house, simply because I wanted to start with the scene outside with kinda sun rise feel to the scene. I had in mind this movie I don't remember where it's from exactly but I think its from some Disney old stuff where camera pans around and there sun rising up and the birds and singing, that's what I had in mind for this scene. As the Camera is zooming in towards the bedroom window music of singing birds. 

This is where I started drawing the new sketches starting with the scene in the bedroom where the person is sleeping when he get's abruptly woken up  by the alarm clock. Whole scene is basically him getting out of bed and heading towards the door. I ended up with around 10-11 drawings which were "ok" for a animatic but now i  had to go look for music and sounds to add. It took me awhile to find a website where i could download sounds for free or without any license so i could use it freely. 

I came over this website freesound.org which was freaking awesome, it had everything i needed for my animatic from singing birds to alarm clocks!

 With all sounds and music downloaded I started up Windows Live Movie Maker, imported all the pictures and just as I was about to put in soundtrack it didn't work.
Apparently the program didn't recognize the files cause i had Windows 10 installed on the pc and the program was outdated. So i went over to their website to check if there was any update but still no solutions. So I went on the web again and searched for a Movie editing program which is easy to use when i came over Filmora. Extreamly easy to use but the editing options are really minimal you can't have more then 1 soundtrack line so I was left with not much of choice. Cause i was thinking about using separate sound track for the sound and one for music in the background.

Evaluation:

So to answer all the questions and give back feedback about the project without writting a whole wall of text. What i learned is that sound can be a good helper when it come to giving out information to the audience when illustration fails. Sounds is like extra information which is a great when production is limited or the budget is. I will definitely take from this experience and use it to create more cleaner and obvious reaction sketches next time! When it comes to the role of Editor i knew much of it from before. It is Editors responsibility to make sure that the work will reach the audience it is he who must add or remove content to make changes so the message reaches the people.
And lasts the color isn't really needed for 2D animatic but it depends on who is going to see the animatic. If its only for editing purposes just for the animator team then no you don't really need, but if you plan on showing this to a studio or some partners there is nothing wrong in adding some more life into the story!

Ive enjoyed the project learn a lot got into some small problems with my pc and some programs but nothing that can't be overcome. I was thinking about getting another video editing program thou cause this one is used now is too simplified and there is hardly any editing options for soundtracks.
I'm not entirely satisfied with the outcome but hopefully next time i'll be prepared better! (dam you windows) :D

Project 06

Project 06

Storyboard

by

Milan M

The Storyboard:

So this project we were suppose to create a storyboard out of the script we made in the earlier project.
Having bad time i had to change the story a bit up last part with the cops and jail was removed and the story only followed up the some extent without losing too much from the orginal script.

The length of the current storyboard is between 1+ to 2 min but can be made longer with more details added which probably will be added when I start with animation. Due to lack of time I had to shorten it down and i'm already not to happy about it. Thing that could have been differently would be the start of the story it could have started differently also the scene where John is about to get out of the bed could have had atleast 2-3 more drawings.  The part where he picks up his broken up bike and the trip to work could have had more drawing and also if i followed the original script where he throws the bike and the car and cops show up that would have increased the length aswell.

With that in mind this story would have been closer to anything from 4 to 5 minutes which would be too long for 1 person to make into animation on so little time. And i'm not exactly a animation genius either so without further ado I give you the Storyboard!!

Project 06

Storyboard

 1.                                              2.

3.                                                4.

 5.                                              6.

 7.                                              8.

 9.                                           10.

 11.                                        12.

 13.                                         14.

 15.                                        16.

 17.                                         18.

19.                                           20.

Evaluation:

So to start of i have to say i've been struggling with the drawing i'm not a big fan of drawing humans it always take so much time. I wish there was more time but this is what i got in the end, I wouldn't say that i'm too happy about it but i consider it "Ok".

If i had more time i would have done this storyboard a bit differently with more drawings and a more in dept story but i guess when we start with the animation part i will try to put in more sketches. There were couple scene that i could redo but that would have to wait until next time also the scene where John is behind the cleaner truck I was thinking about having a Front camera from bikes view just before he heads of the stairs. Also the last scene where he screams in anger i was thinking about having a overview camera so it kinda zooms out in the end. All in all i had a blast with this project i just wish i had more time cause i was really slow with the drawings and some of them were really rushed in the end!