No Matter -- Finished animation

The No Matter animation is complete!

No Matter -- Rendering stage

I used two computers to do this, since I didn't finish the facial animation. As a computer was rendering a certain sequence, I was finalizing and fixing the facial animation on the next sequences.

It took a whole week to render the whole thing, since I used HDTV resolution, and the character's materials had large textures which slowed down rendering considerably. The average per-frame rendering time was 20 minutes.

After this, I assembled the video together with Francisca's 2D animation, made in Adobe Flash, and the song we made with Ricardo Pacheco.

Finally we have all the posters on the walls! They're animate-able and are constrained to not leave the walls. A lot less complicated than the posters which will crawl away from the wall onto the floor.



Now, I'll start animating. After I'm finished, I'll correct the loose ends in the character skinning, and in the character itself, and then the 3D part of the animation should be good to go.

And this happened. I only had one light in the scene so far (to keep renders quick), but I was quite surprised to find out that my character turned out to be a ninja!

Latest Updates!

Today, the character was (almost) completely rigged to the armature.





And we have a little world going. It's got all the walls and floor that we could ever wish for.





And we need some posters on those walls, since the posters are major characters in the story! I created 10 different posters (although I never got to using them all) and put them on the walls.





These posters are going to be rather aggressive. They will stalk our character, crawling the walls. Some will even move to the floor. Being 2D plane primitives, they can't be bent. I had to create a system to make it easy for me to animate the posters through the walls and floor.



The little sphere thing is an Empty. The poster seems to bend because of two perfectly aligned posters, which are following the Empty, but not moving off their wall. This can be achieved with a "Copy location" Constraint, without the Z axis (in case of the floor portion of the poster) (or Y in case of the wall part). The Empty was rotated 45 degrees and will only animate in local coordinates.

No Matter -- Character model (3)

I'm on vacation this week! Vacation to work, I mean.

I finally installed Ubuntu 10.10. I hadn't used Linux in a long time, but Ubuntu is a really mature and user-friendly operating system, and it was easy to adapt. The installation was a lot easier than any other Linux distribution I used before. I used Dropbox to keep my files around, so I was able to quickly install Blender 3D and GIMP and get to work!

Blender runs a lot better now (I have an onboard intel graphics card, so it's pretty impressive that blender is able to run, given the fact that it uses opengl a lot.) and renders have become a bit faster too!

I worked on the hair, a lot. I used only one texture, and some noise maps to make the hair look more volumetric. Here's an early test of the hair:

Here's a beauty render of the character, and an in-editor screenshot. You can see that the hair is formed by alpha planes. This is to help keep the load off the renderer, since I need it to make fast preview renders to test the animation as I go.

There are about 5 lights casting raytraced shadows, but still the render took 9 seconds.

The character has a little skin texture (intentionally made not clearly visible) and doesn't have eyebrows or eyelashes yet...

After the eyebrows, eyelashes and finishing touches, I'm going to create an animation rig. This set of objects will help me animate the model, but it's a hard task to create and set them all up. Stay tuned!

No Matter -- Character model (2)

Here's some progress on the main character. Head was created and finished, eyes roughly rigged, arms ready to go! Next up, hair and all textures (Painting soft shadows, remember?)

The aim here is to create a cartoonish character. Since it won't be so based upon reality I had to make an awkward rigging in the eyes. Fortunately, the software I'm using (blender 3D) supports a "track to" constraint which turned out to be extremely useful, together with constraint attenuations.

I'm on Windows 7 but, since one of the main points of this short film was to only use software which is open-source, I'm going to change to Ubuntu linux this week.

No Matter -- Character model

This is a WIP character model for the short film, "No matter". I'll take some time to talk about this project, later.

There is still a lot to do. Including, the head, hair, and some proportions need attention here.

The film will not have global illumination or indirect lighting, so I need to paint soft shadows in textures. Here, the shoes are ready. They will stay that simple because they will only be seen in the animation for a few frames.