Ember Process 5

It's been a year today since I released Ember online.  And also 11 years since I moved to Canada.  Time flies!

I put together one more Ember process post.  It's a "multi-video video" this time, each showing different stages of the film as it went through production.

Top left: Storyboarding.  I boarded a large chunk of the film before starting the school year.  Lots of little timing tweaks happened during the first couple of weeks.  I planned on animating to the music, so more small changes in timing were made once Denny finished his awesome track!

Top right: Compositing.  I spent a lot of time on the compositing, and that video more or less shows how I went about it.  Lots (looooots) of problem solving in this stage.

Bottom left: Animation!  Those are pretty much all the pencil tests for the film.  I timed the whole film out on X-sheets to figure out the exact timing of the music and the actions that the characters needed to perform and then used TVPaint for all the actual animation.

Bottom right: The final film.  Not much else I can come up with for a description here.

So that's it for the "official" Ember process posts.  I still have plenty of random things from the film lying around, but I'll probably just randomly upload those to my Tumblr sometime, maybe :)

Previous Ember posts can be found here:
Ember Process 4
Ember Process 3
Ember Process 2
Ember Process 1
Ember

Goodmorning Baltimore!

So I did another themed drawing.  This time it revolved around Hairspray, whoot whoot!

This turned out super bubbly, but I suppose that's fitting with what I was aiming for.  I love Hairspray.

Try viewing your day like Tracy Turnblad, people!

Horsies - Part 2

The other half of the horse drawing scans!  Compiled on another page ;)

Werewolf Ballet

We did another art theme-thingy at work.  This time we drew werewolves.  I came up with the idea that this werewolf really liked ballet, so I started researching that and really, really fell in love with ballet!  There are so many beautiful poses to see!  Definitely going to look into that more.  Anyway, here's the werewolfy:

Horsies - Part 1

I've been drawing some horses at work recently, so, naturally, I started drawing horses all over my sketchbook in the last couple of days.  Here's a select bunch:

Well...

...

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this.  Found a nice brush while doing this though!

Hands, Feet...

... and a Wolfy!

Just some compiled drawings from the recent sketchbooks, because I finally started doing that!

I Like Caramel Correttos

That title is pretty irrelevant to this post, but it's the best I could come up with.  So, what have I conjured up this time, you may ask?  Well, it looks like I did another fox thing, and that's because... Well, I don't really know why.  I just did another one.  I want a Caramel Corretto :)

Monkey-Monkey. It's a Monkey

Whoops, forgot to upload this here.  Oh well.  This is still from last week.  I am doing a short animation test (roughly 10 seconds), so that's taking up most of my spare time at the moment.  I'm currently inbetweening, so it's not far from being finished :D

But yeah, have a monkey.  I'll get around to scanning my recent sketchbooks sometime this week.  I actually scanned one last week, but for some reason the scans never got sent to my email address.  Oh well, Second time's the charm... I hope :)

Is It a Weasel?

Worked on this on-and-off for a couple of days.  It's a more finished version of a rougher sketch I uploaded earlier.  I still don't really know what kind of animal it is, but I did look at weasels for colour inspiration.  He's a gardener though: I know that part!

Elephants Are Not Dogs

More elephants.  I had a lot of these, so I compiled them.  So... elephants.

Because sometimes you just want to post twice a day.

There Was a Great Big Moose

Random drawings from the last several weeks.  I noticed I have quite a few things to upload, so here's a page with... uuhm...  Yup, mainly animals :D

February Thingies

I'm currently working on a little animation test, so I'm focusing on that a little more instead of sketching.  Still, here's a select bunch of digital sketches from the last week or so.

Sketching With a Wannabe Pencil

Some digital sketchbook drawings from recent times.  Many of those hands are from Spirou comics :D

Faces and Dragons

Some more compilations.  A whole bunch of faces from the last couple of weeks and a page of dragons that I drew over the Christmas break while watching behind-the-scenes videos about Smaug.  That was a long sentence.

Also, check out Alan Stewart's Instagram.  I'm sure some of these were inspired by his amazing dragon drawings from a while ago.

Compiling. That's What I Do...

Yes.  Compiling things.  Here's more!  This description is very descriptive.

I'm Compiling Again

Had a whole bunch of digital sketches from the last couple of weeks, so I started compiling again!

A Little Bit of Everything

Here's a whole bunch of stuff from the online course, life drawing and sketchbook.  I can't really think of what else to describe this with.  So there :)

Ember Process 2

I knew very early on that I wanted to create a large multiplane environment in which I could use multiple camera angles.  I looked a lot at Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends to see how the levels were put together.  I would literally enter a level, find a particular area with water and move left, right, up and down on the spot for some hours.  Man, they really are gorgeous games.  Anyway, I discovered they created some sort of horizontal water-plane that had vertical planes with artwork that intersected it.  That is what I wanted to do for Ember.

It sounded simple enough, but actually executing it was very, very difficult.  Anyway, here is the first After Effects test that I did in August 2014, where I was discovering camera settings like "Depth of Field".  It's all fun and games when working with three small layers like here, but when there are 200+ levels of high resolution artwork to be processed, After Effects gets a little grumpy.

People kept on mentioning that I needed to add reflections.  I kept looking around on the world wide web to see if there was a way to make the water plane reflective.  Alas, I just couldn't find a way.  I ended up doing exactly what I was trying to avoid: duplicating all those layers so that I could flip them upside down under the water level.  After Effects will keep up.  Right?

Nope.  I ran into a LOT of technical problems.  One thing that I just couldn't solve was the water level randomly popping up and down during camera movements and depth of field changes, resulting in the reflections partially showing up above the water levels:

In the end, I decided to just render the final credits without the reflections.  Partially through that render I decided to export the After Effects file to try it one more time on another computer and... it... worked?!  I don't know how, but I immediately cancelled the first render and started rendering the credits with the reflections this time.  Rendering those credits in HD took two full days on nine computers.  Yup...

So now onto some dragonfly stuff.  I wasn't quite sure how I was going to tackle the four wings.  Animating them by hand would have been fun, but I really wanted to create a particular blurry look for them when they were in flight.  Early on, I tried creating a basic 3D-wing rig in Toon Boom.  Blurs were not being helpful at first, but after a lot of tweaking, I was able to get the desired effect.

The dragonfly has four wings, but whenever it flies, each wing multiplies by three for a total of twelve wings in every flight frame.  All of the wings have different blurs applied to them and all together they were able to get the look I was after.  The inner tips of the wings all come together at one point, which became the point of attachment on the dragonfly.

And to end this post, here's quick 1.5 hour animation test done to see if the whole idea would work.  Thankfully, it did :)

Previous Ember posts can be found here:

Ember Process 1

Ember

One More

One more post for that Hyde character.  It was about time I uploaded these poses and expressions.  I learned a good chunk of things from doing these, so I hope to do more of the Jekyll character at some point soon as well.

Happy new year everyone!