New part of animation

I have decided to add an extra part to this animation, I will use two dragons for this.. I hope to find this challenging and hope the end product is entertaining and will enhance what I've already done.

My idea is to have one dragon floating and spraying fire and the other to fly across the screen. More to come in the coming week.

First Draft

http://youtu.be/rswpsL9ynqo

Second test dragon animation

I made a second test animation using the same technique I had used for the first.

I decided to have the dragon breathing fire so I created a video sequence of a flamethrower type effect using a can of deodorant and match and recording it next to a black piece of cardboard so I could key that color out and put it into the footage using After Effects tracking software.

I ended up with this.

 

I then created a null object and

attached the sequence to the null object I then assigned it to track the motion of the head. Then changed the transparency settings to get rid of the black outline, I felt it gave a good result.

And this is the finished product.

http://youtu.be/J7ukkJbMbnQ

Title Sequence

I decided to have a dark background for my news title sequence, but I wanted it to seem like a world news channel so I chose this image.

I then had to decide what font to use, I decided to use a newspaper clippings font to give it a comic feel as the animation wasn't the most realistic, so a comic feel throughout would fit the piece overall.

 I added rotation to the text and decided to put a footer with the headline the news story would be about which would stay there throughout the animation.

I'm quite happy with this title sequence and I think it adds a bit of a story to the animation that I plan to do.. next on my list to to make a better animated and more perfected render of the test then have the dragon model in other locations so over the next week or so gonna get the camera out and do some more filming.

Title Sequence

This week I decided to make the title sequence for the news story which would precede the videos of dragons around London.

I have not finished it yet but this is the kind of things I was going for, I was thinking of adding fake twitter posts to make it seem like an actual story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp8BWWfDIRo

Boujou test

I got my hands on a working copy of Boujou 4 so decided to test it out, find out what worked and didn't work and make a little test animation. This took about 3 days and in the course I kind of got lost along the way so if I leave anything out and you want to try this out yourself I'd follow this tutorial I found online which I found very informative and helpful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5XFCO_jHXE

Ok so first I put the footage I took into After Effects and turned it into a jpeg image sequence so it can be transferred easily between the 3 programs I was going to use.

I made sure the frame rate was 30fps as that is the standard frames per second of Maya and After Effects, by the way some of this footage I have not used in the test but may use later.

This is the footage I used.

I then tracked the motion and made a camera solve in Boujou 4, this was surprisingly easier than I expected it to be and I was pleasantly surprised as to the accessibility of this program, great job Boujou, Autodesk take note.

I basically just clicked on track features and then on create camera solve. I ended up with a 3D space which would be a very simple imitation of the environment of the footage I took.

I then exported the camera solve as a .ma making sure it's in the format of Maya 4+ and I was ready to import it into my Maya scene file. And that is where it got difficult.

What you will end up with is an animated image plane that will play a sequence and a moving camera, the camera solve will have made a basic virtual space to dictate where you can put 3D objects to make them fit into your scene, for some reason I had a lot of trouble with this footage no matter what I did so I cut the video down. I may use different video footage for the final product.

I made several layers for the animated dragon to fit into the scene these were all rendered in .tga so I could put them directly back into After Effects. I made a color layer, alpha layer and shadow layer.

The color layer was to show just the color in the scene and nothing else. Here is a screen shot of the color layer, I had to take out the background also.

The Alpha layer a black and white image of the silhouette of the dragon. This was to correct the color and to create dynamic shadows.

To create this I used a "usedbackground" and a "surfaceshader"

This is the alpha map of the dragon

I then made the shadow layer this was just to make the shadowing so all color was turned to white so the ending render would only focus on the dark shadows created by the virtual spot light.

They were all connected to a masterlayer, this is what the scene file looked like before being rendered.

So yeah after that I put it into After Effects and added each layer onto the original footage I had taken. However for whatever reason a white square appeared so I attempted to mask it out, and it was still rather shaky so I will keep experimenting to try and get it right, as stated I might just use more still footage as the footage I recorded had quite a lot of movement.

And this was the final product, still needs work but quite happy with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5fbxtA9Ybs&feature=youtu.be