meow meow meow
hi jesse and friends and everyone my notes are rather messy and some weeks my health decides to go 180 and my body decides that i should be sick so some notes are… not there…… im sorry……
2017
Experimental Animation
3840 x 480 PIXELS
This piece aims to bring their viewers into an illusionary world of flowers of different colours through the use of 3D space and perspective. It can also be said that they are looking through the eyes of an insect as it finds the flowers to pollinate.
the final differs greatly as i have decided to add in background in the end. Also i edited the video to reduce the ghosting effect as i experienced vertigo in some parts of my video.
Photos by Solomon Quek Jia Liang
TITLE:
Advenature (ADVENTURE + NATURE)
THEME:
Illusion
CONCEPT:
This piece aims to bring their viewers into an illusionary world of flowers of different colours through the use of 3D space and perspective. It can also be said that they are looking through the eyes of an insect as it finds the flowers to pollinate.
The process is separated into different posts. However, I will collate some of the more important ones ehre.
Maya, Aftereffects CC 2015
This is a work-in-progress. There is still much that I have to do.
Her work involves flowers, and animation as well. Here is her portfolio link.
I was particularly intrigued by one of her works, Rapunzel. What is interesting about this piece was the fact that it was so simple to make, yet it was therapeutic and pleasing to look at, something I wish i could do, as I hope MAN wall could have a lot more pleasing flowers to look at.
Rapunzel 13, 2010. Variable, approx. 26 x 10 feet link
Rapunzel 9, 2005. Variable, approx. 10 feet high link
Her portfolio has many more works!! Please go and see haha.
I also managed to borrow a book about her from Ina. I went to study particularly on that piece.
yeap the one in week 7 heh
- less structured, more random, but not chaotic.
- play with more color combination
- play with them growing upside down and not just up. (maybe half from bottom up while half going downwards)
- vary the growth of the flowers, don’t all grow and disappear at the same time.
- Make the ending more like an ending.
- Flowers at the side of course didn’t work very well.
- Add many more different flowers on the same file. Vary size, growth speed and how it disappears in the timeline. (can either do that in maya or aftereffects)
- depth, 3d, perspective
After taking into account on all of the feedback received, I continued the work on painteffects in a new direction to go to.
In week 7, i made a mistake of not previewing properly before i render in aftereffects. This was the accident created, which afterwards I explored more in that direction.
During week 8, I was on the verge of giving up on this project because I hit rock-bottom for really long. You can click on this OSS link for more details.
After week 7, I indeed went to explore more, and even sketch out new ideas to visualise what I want my work to be. Initally, i wanted to place all sorts of flowers to make a garden feel.
So basically, I wanted to place many flowers surrounding a lone tree, creating a story which i could tell others, something I really aspire to be as a character animator, but wanting to do it through experimental animation instead of animating a character with expressions HAHAHA.
However, this really didn’t work well at all, even if I animate it moving forward. All in all, it was really chaotic, the colours clash throughout and it wasn’t pleasing to the eye at all. Below was some stills I captured.
I took a step back, and looked again at my references, studied better and came back to try again, even though I was asked to change my idea as i was stuck but I am generally a persistent person when it comes to my own work once I am set on it.
I posted this just for the sake of this presentation ;_; it was really bad. Haha.
From the pictures taken from her book (scroll up), we can see she only uses 1-2 types of flowers, with different colours with turbulence manipulated only. the placement of the flowers are all randomly for both the x and y-axis. More can be found on the week 7/8 post.
Following that analysis, I restarted again, only using two types of flowers this time: flowerTallred and DandelionYellow. Before I forget, here is what the program looks like right now.
This is my current interface. It looks messy on the program but it will look better once you open render view on Maya.
This was one of the stills i caught while I was still experimenting, which i thought looked great, so I went with this. Initially, i added a few more types of flowers in front, but i removed it. as it looked really, really quite messy. Now i am stuck with this idea, and played with the camera speed. The video below was the official second prototype (which had only finished rendering during Longfei’s presentation… heng ah). I liked the dreamy look as the camera moves slowly while the flowers zoom in.
The quality is quite bad? :\
My aim would be the next week would be that I
Play around with more camera movements such as left and right, rotation.
Find music to fit the piece
Tweak turbulence values and more colour combination for the flowers and leaveless daffodils.
BACKGROUND!!!!!!!!!!!
(paiseh i was typing this at 3am so there might be like a slight passive-aggressive tone as i was dead tired already, spare me please so those who read this before i edit im really sorry hah)
SO! I shall continue my post here!
Also I know i am spamming the OSS feed and i am terribly sorry, I make sure to try to post every week if not I will forget that this existed lol and not make any progress at all
Look at Steinkamp’s piece, she uses a same type of flower but different colours. She was my main reference, that’s why I kept talking about her.
However, I could not just copy her entire concept whole sale as there are some difficulties as stated in the previous post. I would need to have my own ideas and twist as well.
Taking into account 3d spaces, depth and perspective, my slightly new direction would be to consistently use a same type of 1-2 flower for my work with different colours while maintaining the 3D space. My only animation would be in Maya with the camera as it goes on an adventure along the flowers.
It is really messy in the software, it looks nicer when rendered… I think
I plan to play around with turbulence values on week 10-11 once my concert is over and I have more time to do my work. Right now, my main focus is to arrange the flowers properly, as well as get my camera right. The colours are important as well.
This was a still caught on Maya. I had initially also PLANNED to place 2 different types of flowers in different layers so the flowers keep changing as the camera progresses. (e.g 1st layer sunflower and rose , 2nd layer daffodil and daisy etc etc)
But the render preview was not up to my expectations yet so I removed it, and stuck to using 2 flowers (flowerlarge and daffodils as I can play around with the petals and the effects was really pretty!) In this picture, the layers with the dandelions and daisies looked really pleasing, after taking a step back, so I intend to continue in this direction.
ALSO MY GOOGLE DRIVE TITLE WAS LIKE a random title I came up with in a few minutes and i was hoping i could change the title…. :(.. I would like to edit my description as well??? Though the description was indeed the gist of my work.
Pardon my lengthy post ahead as I did not have much progress till now, and this will help me present tomorrow so i’ll… dump my things here….
Two weeks ago, i hit rock-bottom. I thought I had a direction to go to after the coincidental good results during week 7 where I had accidentally created a zoom-in effect on the flowers which were really, really pretty. However, I lost that file and had to redo all over again (I still have the video below though) and that was when I hit rock bottom.
I felt that I am trying to rush things too quickly as I was aware that I had a dance concert coming up next week (not relevant but I think that was one of the reasons haha) and I just wanted to catch up on my studies, and particularly such a heavy project like MAN so I do not fall behind (actually I am already am for some modules – particularly drawn animation).
I had an initial concept in mind where there is a garden with all sorts of flowers i can find from paint effects (with literally trees and all), but it didn’t work out so well no matter how much i tried to arrange them in the way i want, unlike the last time i did it.
These are some stills i captured while documenting my process. (AND MY HANDWRITING’S RIDICULOUS??? IM SO SORRY??? AS WELL AS MY SKETCHES WITH ALL THE BOUNCING BALLS??????) Some of the comments were for week 7 as well though.
These were…. OK but i didn’t like how structured it was. I wanted it too look more random and the colors more in harmony. If i were to arrange them randomly, It would look chaotic And i didn’t like that. Also it looked empty. I wanted to make use of all the space in the media wall. Right now the negative space with the flowers was perhaps 50-50. Not nice at all, not nice.
This was the progress for week 7. I liked how the colors blend well together. Perhaps it might be because the arrangement in week 8 did not take into account the color wheel. Maybe it was because there was too many flowers.
I took a step back afterwards and looked at my inspiration again, Jennifer Steinkamp. She might not have done it using Maya (which no one was sure of, even her portfolio does not state much), but I can at least study how she plans her works, her flowers and colours used, though there was some difficulties that I have thought that I would have encountered.
So i went back to look at Jennifer Steinkamp’s work again, probably for the entire of week 8? Since i wanted to observe even further.
I wanted to have this clustered, close-up effect like Rapunzel. However, her work is in portrait while MAN wall is in landscape. The first thing I have to think about is, how do I plan to make it a landscape?
Make 1 and duplicate in in aftereffects
- This was one of the ideas that would be easier to execute, but it would ultimately lack in vairety???? So i would need variety at the beginning
Draw many more and make do the close up thing at the end
- This was more ambitious but the effect would be nicer. But I don’t have to sleep when it is rendering. I’ll relive those 3D Production days again!!!!
Do a separate film as the second part of the clip and transit it from the first close-up clip.
Which really, to be honest, does not sit well with me. I tried doing that already but it looked weird.
–edit: ok i found a landscape one though the height is still larger than the MAN wall’s and the ratio is more like 16:9 in contrary to the MAN’s
Rapunzel 13, 2010.
From there, and the book I have studied, I have observed that the flowers were arranged NOT from the same plane, but rather, DIFFERENT PLANES. The values of the y-axis were different and not a zero all the time, hence creating a variation in height. Also, she has only used i think a total of 2 types of flowers for each installation, unlike me where i used 1381748234815374239372643294234 flowers…. no wonder I hit a dead end. Ina also told me to use lesser types of flowers.
Here is a close up i took from my book. There were many variations made by her, and I love the magical effect it has even on just the book.
During the remaining time i had, i was playing around with different type of 2-3 flowers together. The featured image was one of them. It was an improvement but it was lacking.
During week 6, when we went to test our prototypes on the media wall, i ended up disliking how structured my flowers was and wanted them to be arranged in a more random manner, rather than being a bunch among themselves.
This week, i tried to mix the flowers together to give a messier yet not chaotic arrangement. I have not played with other values and properties yet.
i am very sad Overall, Ina liked it a lot although it was (very far) from my intended objective from my final work. I am probably gonna stick to this although this was really done by accident (so i should create more accidents then i can get good grades)
now that the initial design is good, I would need to do a few sketches to visualise what i want my stills to look like.
Also need to play with when the flowers behind come in and ensure they do not come out, also need to play around with different angles as some pixels can been seen :\. Maybe other than zooming in, i can also make it go left and right, or top down as well.
Start to play around with turbulence values and appearance of flowers as well.
password: abc
These were the feedback I got from my first prototype from Ina and my friends, along with my own POV on what could be improved.
(p.s i suspect there was an error while exporting it as an image so the white parts)
I was rather happy that i managed to get the flowers to grow :D. However, I feel that there is more to improve on this prototype to make it look more presentable.
Other than more experimentation with 3D and 2D spaces, I will need to add music and background. Initally, i did not want to add a background because i thought it would be too distracting. However, the black background was too bland on the media wall as they only sway about on the same position. I think a light background would contrast well with the flowers so that the flowers would stick out more. Will update again.
Also set my resolution wrongly on the media wall. Tsk. I sigh at my clumsiness.
Can’t seem to get the thing right…. why… huhuhu T^T
initially i had a pink background but i removed it was it was too distracting.
I also found out that i put too little flowers for some areas… will update this tomorrow again once i am done with the media wall test. Will need to do more research to my topic to create better effects.
Also I did not consider the number of flowers per tube when i first started, so some ended up being rather empty (eg daisies). Will need to re-render.
Also tried arranging the flowers vertically. I felt the hyacinth were too small to stand. Would need to test sizes and speed out as well. Need to add more flowers so i will need to further my research…..
Initially i added sunflowers as well, but the turbulence does not seem to match well and it ended up rather chaotic. I removed it at the end. However, the sunflowers were quite nice so I would made edits to it rather than not including it into the whole video.
I found out that there might also be a need to extend the video from a 30sec to a 1 min video. Have not added music yet so i will add it after i finalised everything!!! 🙁
i don’t know what to do… ok kidding I need to play with more features such as the stroke time and texture flow… I did play with them but I am still not sure how it works so i didn’t include it inside this prototype. However the final one might have them… I loved the effect of the flowers gradually disappearing like fireworks so I thought it would be good to add a few to create a wave!!!
(This needs to be EXPERIMENTED ON COMPUTER FIRST BUT IT KEEPS CRASHING SO ANNOYING T^T)
I might consider adding trees as well to create a garden-like feel and import high-res images from the internet as Ina suggested the last time.. but i have to study Jennifer Steinkamp’s book first…. need to kop with tissue paper haha. KKIE BYE HAHA
I do not have mental ray on my computer 🙁 And i tried rendering. There was a problem and all my images can’t be displayed.
This is an example on flowers growing and flowers swaying across the wind. I haven’t had a sketch or an idea on how i want to arrange them so this shall do for now??? I will get to it as soon as possible.
EDIT here is a rendered version which was then exported to aftereffects
Sample of flowers growing and flower influenced by the wind.
Now i have to figure out the arrangement of the flowers
Handsome guys are colourful but it’s definitely flowers over boys for MAN… MAN!!! omg!! (pls ignore me)
After consulting with Ina on Monday, I have decided to explore further into flowers and how i can incorporate it into my topic. With that, I have decided to play around with Maya Painteffects
And then I FORGOT TO SAVE and now i have to redo ;_;
Aside from that, she also introduced me to Jennifer Steinkamp, an animation artist who makes use of Maya Painteffects to do her installations. She is very famous and has experimented with various items in Painteffects such as plants and paint (oil and acrylic)
These were made by varying a few values (such as wind speed or type of wind, as well as the appearance of the flowers (petal colours, no. of petals etc)
2. LoopMade with paint fluids or fibre brush, drawn into a loop with an addition of a little turbulence. to make it have a ‘vine’ feel.
