Bottled Dreams - a final level

Practical Project Report
Bottled Dreams
Sverre André Kvernmo
Teesside University
1
Abstract
This report details my efforts to create an animated short film from scratch. The
report takes a close look at all parts of the creative process, from inspirational material,
writing a treatment and storyboarding through to 3D asset creation, animating and post
production. Motivation for the project's content is traced to its beginning, and contemporary
influences that came about during production are discussed. Golden principles for story,
animation and camera are considered, each method looked at in turn and compared to the
application of the project. Experimental creation techniques are explored and the reasons
behind creative choices are highlighted along the way. As some unconventional techniques
are described and because not all 3D creation language is yet dictionary material, the
appendixes include a short explanation of special terms used throughout the document. The
file iterations and backup plans applied to the project's evolution is explained and a closer
look given to the application of software and hardware tools. A detailed list of assets applied
to production is produced, including notes on their usage. The report concludes with
detailed lists of references and bibliography, down to individual textures applied to the key
assets.
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Acknowledgements
These are the people and places that have contributed directly to the project.
Michel Roger. Mr. Roger's very meticulous tutorial on lowpoly modeling, the Joan of Arc
tutorial, taught me a lot of valuable modeling techniques that I still use, but more
importantly, the fruits of the tutorial - a female surface anatomy - was the basis for what
later became the film's protagonist, the dryad.
Peter Starostin. Author of the popular MAX animation rig. I contacted Mr. Starostin about
permission to modify his creation in order to make a female protagonist, and was given the
green light to do so. Fusing a modified version of the female surface anatomy from the Joan
of Arc tutorial, the end result was a female equivalent to the MAX rig.
The CG Textures Team. To my knowledge, the texture resource www.cgtextures.com was a
free and unconditional service at the time I downloaded the textures used for the project.
Without this site the look and shape of the film's antagonist, the rhinotaur, would have been
completely different as I partially sculpted the creature's model to fit the available texture
detail.
The Freesound Project. Close to all the sounds I didn't record myself were collected from
www.freesound.org.
The Audacity Team. The freeware program Audacity was used to assemble the project's
sound effects.
Alexander Edvard Fusdahl. Improved the animation rig of the rhinotaur model, bringing it to
version 2.0. Without this improvement I wouldn't have been able to do proper animation
blocking, and the animation quality would consequently have suffered.
Bjørnar Johansen. Mr. Johansen created some additional assets for the film's set, which
were useful during the buildup phase and the first block animation renders. None of the
assets created remain in the final product, but his help was nonetheless important and
helped shape the creative choices during the project.
Kajsa Kvernmo. When I needed a model to pose for some of the project's most important
texture assets, the face/head-texture of the film's protagonist, my younger sister was good
enough to volunteer. Having a familiar nearness to the photographic source helped me to
treat the source with respect and tread carefully around its modification.
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Table of contents
1)
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 5
2)
Influences ........................................................................................................................................ 7
3)
Telling the story ............................................................................................................................. 12
4)
Tools .............................................................................................................................................. 16
5)
Sizes ............................................................................................................................................... 17
6)
The set ........................................................................................................................................... 18
7)
Rhinotaur ....................................................................................................................................... 19
8)
Dryad ............................................................................................................................................. 24
9)
Audio ............................................................................................................................................. 27
10)
Animation .................................................................................................................................. 28
11)
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 31
12)
Appendix 1 - Terminology ........................................................................................................ 33
13)
Appendix 2 - Project origins ...................................................................................................... 35
14)
Appendix 3 - UV texturing ......................................................................................................... 41
15)
Appendix 4 - Backup plan .......................................................................................................... 44
16)
Appendix 5 - References............................................................................................................ 48
17)
Appendix 6 - Bibliography ......................................................................................................... 53
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1) Introduction
A folktale in spirit, the film includes imagined creatures and the insides of a coastline
fortress. A larger surrounding world is implied to an otherwise claustrophobic set. Typical
synonyms to define the setting include myth, fairytale, and fantasy. However, I've been very
deliberate about the lack of fashion indicators in the project, such as recognizable clothes or
discernable furniture. These have been omitted to decrease the weight of periodical
indicators and minimize any mental pigeon holing of the film's content.
I am aiming to use the available tools to create an expression that carries many of the
traditional 2D animation and theater stage elements. I want to underplay rather than
overplay the 3D animated film staple, to attempt a differentiation from the current norm.
This search for the unique is an integral part of the philosophy that drove the project and
kept it interesting to me. At the journey's end I hoped to find a commercially viable style that
might be applied at a greater production scale.
These were lofty goals, and there was no guarantee for reaching the target, but as a
graphic artist I found little inspiration in solidifying the status quo, or setting out to do more
of the same, even if should I manage to achieve the current standard. Apart from these
admittedly somewhat ambiguous artistic goals, my core purpose with the project was to
hone my animation skills and other aspects of unsolid art craft, like visual style definition and
fantastically detailed creature design.
There are two characters in the film, the dryad and the rhinotaur. To keep them
interesting and a tad mysterious, I've refrained from naming them beyond their creature
type. I've also resisted the temptation to give them fully fledged character bios. Rather, they
are the archetype of warden and prisoner. Most of the rest is up to the audience's
imagination and the future possibilities of branching the story. In the eventuality of a followup, the nature of the prisoner's crime may perhaps, if indeed one has been committed, be
explored. As it is, the titular thief of the story could be either of the two characters.
Creation of rhinotaur and dryad has been an iterative process and the one's evolution
has along the way affected the other. Just like the set was modeled free of functionless
props, the characters were stripped down to their bare essentials, free of belongings,
weapons, fashion indicators or anything else that might distract from the central theme of
perception confinement.
Project rules
At the project outset a few rules were laid down as leading principles. Some also
became rules out of necessity along the way.
i.
No dialogue. This rule was set to maximize the potential audience, eliminate the
need for language localization and to challenge myself to use body language and
creature design to convey any inherent messages to the story.
ii.
Timelessness. A deliberate avoidance of direct time period indicators in the creation
of the set and characters. No excessive furniture, no needless props.
iii.
Handheld-to-HD graphics compatibility. The graphics were made to read well on a
small screen, such as that seen on portable platforms. This has often been described
as an untapped marked with much potential, so besides the artistic challenge this
provides, it makes economic sense to see what can be done in this segment.
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Contrastingly, all assets were made to satisfy the need for high definition detail.
HDTV compatibility ensures that assets can be applied to venues that might have
opened in the videogame or TV/film markets. This polarized production method was
also applied to ensure that any commercial product that might arise out of the
production will inherently share assets and so eliminate the need of duplicates for a
port across platforms.
iv.
No serious violence. Though the characters struggle with each other, there is never
any use of weaponry. Some cartoony violence does occur, but should always seem
self-inflicted.
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2) Influences
Russ Nicholson' illustration of a rhino-man,
from the Fighting Fantasy book Citadel of
Chaos has been a huge inspiration for
developing the rhinotaur of the project.
A blend of videogames and
animated film have inspired the visual
style of the project. Having been a
videogame designer and computer graphic artist
since 1995, my expression is unavoidably colored
by the road travelled to this point in time.
Prior to working with videogames it was my
hobby to animate sprites on simple 8-bit computer
systems. As such, I brought a desire to animate
into my career in videogames. Working as a level
designer, I was always thrilled by the moving of
environmental collision elements to challenge the
player. Examples include crushing doors, timed
elevators, touch plate traps, hidden bridges and
collapsing towers. As videogame graphics in my
working environment became increasingly "under
siege" from realism, the simple geometrical shapes
that were at the root of such environmental
animation systems became more and more rare,
eventually being completely replaced with the high
detailed immobile beauty of background graphics
necessitated by commercialism's inflation of realism onto the game world, as well as the
technical limitations brought on by increased online compatibility. Environment animated
games thus became the exception rather than the rule. Thus, I eventually found myself
deprived of perhaps the root mechanic that fuelled my thrust into the videogames industry animation. After a drawn out burnout I eventually left my job as a videogames designer and
decided to get an education in animation.
Since leaving the videogames industry I've over the last two years done some
animation groundwork, completing two simple video efforts timed to music. Otherwise, this
is my first serious animation project. I have tried to retain the elements of videogame
graphics that I enjoy, while aiming to learn as much as I can from current and past
practitioners of animated art. I have been mindful not to singularly emulate a currently
defined commercial style. This is a one-man project and I don't want to overextend by
reaching for the top of the animation food chain. I feel that I throughout the project have
developed a personalized style that I'm happy to showcase and hope to develop further.
Below follows an overall list of media that have been strong influences on my graphic
art.
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i. Books. The Brothers
Marvel's many super creatures were like a
Lionheart (Astrid Lindgren,
family extensions for me, growing up. I
felt like I knew these characters. Here we
1973). I first learnt to assemble
have Rhino and The Thing, probably the
letters into words by being
most direct influences on the project
read to, reading and re-reading
assets.
this book, permanently
imprinting vivid images of tree-clad forests in pink
bloom, prepubescence escaping oppressive dungeons, a
struggle for freedom against an oppressive tyrant and
treachery amongst friends. A comic book of The Count of
Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas, 1844) is a story of
revenge and unjust incarceration that left a mark. The
Prince and the Pauper (Mark Twain, 1881) told a story of
a young boy lost and out of his element. By the time I
was a teenager The Hobbit (J. R. R. Tolkien, 1937)
fanned the forgotten flame of fantastique left by
Lindgren into a blaze. The branching storytelling
technique in the chapters of The Warlock of Firetop
Mountain (Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, 1982)
further solidified my interest in the romanticized
medieval. Eyes of the Dragon (Stephen King, 1987) is
another fantasy tale I devoured where imprisonment
and a dangerous captor is a central theme. Comic
books in general were also a favorite growing up,
particularly Carl Barks' take on Donald Duck, all the
Marvel Comics magazines available in northern Norway
(mostly Amazing Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Hulk and X-Men), as well as the comic
strips derived from Robert E. Howard's many books about Conan the barbarian.
Comic books instilled me with a love of shape and color, and inspired me to continue
drawing cartoony figures of my own. More recently, I purchased a book on the
artwork of John Bauer, Swedish Folktales (2004) whose images of fair elf ladies and
burly trolls were an inspiration in creating the project's characters. As an adult I've
also been impressed by the dark rooms described in The Process (Franz Kafka, 1925)
and other written works by the same author, who might in term have affected the
choice of set lighting and mood. The minotaur of ancient myth should be mentioned,
as should the extremely meticulous and still unsurpassed works of animation pioneer
Eadweard Muybridge. In particular Animals in Motion (1957).
ii.
Videogames. The first animated videogames to start
applying smooth lifelike animation, Karateka
(Bröderbund, 1984), the rotoscoped Prince of Persia
(Brøderbund, 1989) and Another World (Delphine
Software, 1991) left indelible impressions. Out of all
videogames that have been an influence, Doom II:
Hell on Earth (id Software, 1994) is unrivalled. Its
crisp creature sprites (and accompanying monster
miniatures in latex and pewter) are looks I've aspired
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The final screen of Jordan
Mechner's Karateka holding a deadly princess.
to and tried to emulate in the project's creature design. Much of the energy that has
gone into the film's antagonist is a romantic yearning for the fervor that followed in
the wake of my Doom II obsession, 1994-1996. A short list of the things that made
this game stand out artistically for me:
 Horror-fun. The cute, but scary monsters. Visual gore in Doom 2 was mostly
laughable, because the detail level was so low. Though it was a brutal game,
tensions were more due to immersive suspense, technological shock and good
sound design, rather than visual gore.
 Palette constraints. The super saturated and crispy readability of the limited 256colour palette. White-out golden yellows, deep
washed of marble
greens, many shades
of ochre and an
absence of dark reds.
 Pixelism. The blocky
scalable pixel grid graphics exemplify 8-bit
romanticism. Even though textures are many
times larger these days I've tried to
incorporate this type of pointillism into the HD
graphics of the assets for the film. This can be
seen in the patterning on the antagonist's
surface skin, and choice of massive bricks for
cell walls.
 Geometric speed and precision. Today's games
are so detailed that much of the sleek elegance
of movement and ease of readability that was
pioneered in Doom is irrevocably gone. A
simplistic look-system enforced by limited 3D
actually worked to keep the
horizontal action wide and fast, as
well as holding the screen level, like
it is often seen in cinema.
 Crystallized pixels. Doom II, together
with many other successful low-bit
Archvile and Demon, two of
1994's Doom monsters,
games, such as Sacred Armor of
surrounding the 2011
Antiriad (1986, Palace Software) and
project's antagonist, the
The Chaos Engine (1993, Bitmap Brothers) applied a
rhinotaur.
texturing technique that leaves few featureless surfaces
and apply tightly packed, or "crystallized" pixel groups where adjacent pixels work
in concert to sprout shape.
The influences from Doom II, and the other games listed, has gravitated the
project's assets towards an alternative visual branching that's attempting to contrast
the current HD mainstream, and successive Doom title's much heavier, figurative
detail-laden sense of realism. The project assets aim for a previously unrealized style
in this vein, with few contemporary references - rather, the project is setting out to
define a backtracked variation on existing standards.
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Animated film influences are listed in the next sub-chapter, but it should be
mentioned that animated 3D characters had already made an impression on me
through videogames a few years before it became cinema entertainment.
Particularly, the fighting game Tekken 3 (Namco, 1997) with its huge range of martial
arts moves is a direct kinetic inspiration. Tekken's fighting system pioneered some
advanced strategies where opponents entered into dances of limb-intertwined
throws and grapples. Being able to reverse an opponent's attack and turn it against
him, it or her were one of the most satisfying animations to execute successfully in
this series. Anticipating reversals could even lead to reversal-reversals. To a lesser
extent, other fighting games like the first 3D beat'em up arcade, Virtua Fighter (AM2,
1993) and the first fighter to sport a 360 degrees arena Tobal (Dreamfactory, 1996)
are also examples of early 3D that's at the foundation of how I've seen these type of
character conflicts come to life. Recently the Street Fighter (Capcom, 1987) series
also went fully 3D, in a stylistic tour-de-force that shines a light to the path ahead for
fantastic 3D anatomical animation, and Street Fighter IV (Capcom, 2008) is perhaps
the closest thing to the look I
am aiming for with my own 3D Lei Wulong was probably the most
advanced beat'em up character yet
character efforts.
seen, when he first appeared in
In sum, Doom II has
Tekken 2, sporting advanced motion
deeply affected the 2D
captured martial arts over multiple
styles.
texturing techniques of the
assets production, while Tekken 3 has
deeply affected the 3D character animation
style. The other games listed are also
influences, but Doom and Tekken represent
the archetype landmarks I've been
repeatedly exposed to, and so are probably
the most direct root influences.
iii.
Film/TV. The film The Shawshank Redemption (Castle Rock Entertainment, 1994) and
Papillon (Allied Artists, 1973) for their prison break themes. The film Old Boy (Egg
Films, 2003) for its tense side-scrolling fight scene. The proverb "Fool me once, shame
on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." because it describes the story's arc and plot
twist. Animated films have unavoidably affected the look and animation style of the
project, but I've been mindful to at least try and create an original look to the project,
and not only follow the popular flow. Animated films whose style I aspire to include
40s and 90s Disney (1992's Aladdin in particular), Dreamworks' Kung Fu Panda (2008)
for its inventive chi and contemporary Pixar (2008's WALL·E, 2009's Up) for their
stylized and effective minimalist animation. When animating a bipedal creature in 3D
it is almost impossible to get around the first behemoth Toy Story (Pixar, 1995). If
anything, getting your bipedal cartoony lead not to bear any resemblance to Toy
Story's lead Woody, is a difficult task.
More recently, the multitude of films that are available online have been
influential joyrides. One has been more of a compass needle than the others for its
animation style, and that is Gobelin's Burning Safari (2007). I thoroughly enjoy the
rhythmic snappiness and precise compressed pace of this effort. Still well beyond
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what I am capable of, the film has nonetheless been at the back of my mind
throughout production and represents my current animation aspiration of choice.
During my childhood I was a great fan of gymnast Nadia Comaneci, the first
gymnast to get a perfect 10 in the Olympics. I hadn't thought about her in decades
until I had finished animating some of the more acrobatic moves for dryad. Looking
Comaneci up on the internet I found a slew of her efforts resonated deeply with my
third-person kinetic memory. I suspect there's a little bit of her in the film, so I'm also
naming her as an inspiration. The first fully animated feature film I watched was a
cinema screening of Robin Hood (Walt Disney Studios, 1973). It wasn't until a recent
re-viewing of this feature that I re-discovered the rhino-man shape of the castle
guards prevalent in this feature. This rediscovery happened after the completion of
rhinotaur v3.0 - the version of rhinotaur employed throughout the artefact.
Walt Disney Studios' rhino-man toon.
iv.
Music. I listened repeatedly to Massive Attack's then newly released album
Heligoland (Virgin, 2010) while drawing the storyboards. Many other artists have
been indispensable fuel for getting into the productive zone and are just too
numerous to mention. Suffice to say, I work with headphones on more often than
not and find that music helps shield against surrounding distractions that for me,
more often than not, culminate in inefficiency.
v.
Architecture. For the
creation of the set and
the imagined world
beyond it, I applied
subtle architectural
distortions, equivalent to
light influences from the
likes of Escher and
Piranesi. This might not
be immediately obvious
in the film, but it helped
to have an internal image
of the world surrounding
the core set.
Prison, with a central hanging
lantern, by Piranesi.
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3) Telling the story
The premise of the story has been written to be immediate and universal. The
project's first rule has been that of including no dialogue that necessitates translation. This
rule was set in order to make the film easily understandable and to eliminate translation.
Set size, MacGuffins and story arcs
One of Alfred Hitchcock's storytelling principles was
minimizing the set's size in the story, to maximize the space for
the character drama. This is evident in his film Lifeboat (Twentieth
Century Fox, 1944), which takes place entirely onboard a small
boat. Another principle of Hitchcock that's been emulated, is the
identification of the story's central object, or MacGuffin. To begin
with there really is no discernable MacGuffin. For the rhinotaur,
keeping dryad in the cell is motivation. To her, escaping the cell is
motivation. Eventually, the introduction of a sedative becomes
the object that breaks the deadlock of the story, and shoots for a
surprising twist.
Other than that, the tried and tested storytelling principle
of a story arc has been observed, so the events can be
compartmentalized threefold into a beginning, a middle and an
end, with the hero first being established, then put into a pickle
and eventually solving said pickle.
Storyboards
The storyboards were drawn in a simplified style that doesn't reflect the detail of the
finished renders. Besides reflecting my lack of ability to draw finished 3D renders by hand,
this was done to keep the time budgeted for storyboarding intact and to allow for quick
pencil experimentation with different solutions, while drawing. The end result wasn't just
stick figures - the size, mass and relative proportions of the characters are readable. Light
sources are visible to some extent and all the important set pieces identifiable, including
desired special effects.
Camera placement, including tentative camera transitions have been roughly placed
in the storyboards, but precise perspective lines avoided to allow creative freedom, space
contortions (such as aged architecture) and creative application of the 3D tool's specific
functions and environment.
It was a stated aim to draw the storyboards clear enough that a third party should be
able to read the events, but I'm not sure this was achieved completely, since there often is
some implied animations between the panels. Helper symbols were added where necessary,
like curving arrows to show camera or character movement.
12
Storyboard pages were numbered chronologically and individual panels numbered
incrementally according to what camera they applied. This way, the number of unique
cameras were kept under control, providing a concise storytelling anchor that successfully
fought off the threat of disorientating the viewer with too many viewpoints.
After digitization, the storyboards were further compressed and systemized, to allow
for the creation of an animatic. In the animatic, shots that were drawn repeatedly in the
storyboards were reduced to one choice background, applying the common panel graphic
that came out best. Characters from the other panels of the same shots were then cut-andpasted on top of the chosen panel background. This way a readable animatic was achieved,
with a minimum of wobbly background line drawings.
Camera
A perspective reminiscent of a theaterscene, seen from the viewpoint of the
audience, is the most dominant camera in the
storyboards and has been the anchor
viewpoint throughout production, also
referred to as the primary camera, or camera
5. This camera placement was the result of
taking down brainstorm sketches while
watching a Harold Lloyd film. The film in
particular that inspired this choice of camera
was an early scene in Safety Last (Hal Roach
Studios, 1923) - 03:56 into the Harold Lloyd The
Definitive Collection version of this film. I was
A scene from The Harold Lloyd film Safety
struck by the elegant simplicity of this shot,
Last, which inspired the composition of the
and its similarity to a theater scene. I continued to take notes from
film's main set.
the techniques used in this early cinema film, which proved useful
and refreshing. I've since begun collecting early cinema classics, to approach an
understanding of cinematography's roots like I understand the roots of videogames.
Most camera positions have been placed to emulate real camera men and heavy
cameras as they would be positioned during a traditional TV- or film- set. This has been done
to play into the fact that the audience's eye is likely more trained towards these type of
camera placements, rather than the more freeform computerized cameras that in effect
don't have to fight gravity. Hopefully this should work towards heightening the audience
immersion.
The exception, or rather the extension, to this rule has been the ability to place
cameras inside of objects that exist on the scene, but that are hidden once the camera inside
13
them are activated. This prop penetration allows for slightly more information into the
camera lens without having to resort to distortive fish-eye lens fields of view. A slight tilt was
also added to most cameras in order to break with the parallel lines between the scene's
dominant brickwork and the screen's edges, and to add an organically saggy touch, that
lends age to the architecture of the stone room.
There are three main cameras inside of the film's main chamber - the dryad's cell.
These are the primary camera (camera 5), the secondary camera (camera 7) and the tertiary
camera (camera 0). The secondary camera is placed perpendicularly to the cell's door, just
inside the wall over dryad's bed, to show her actions when she's exploring her cell. The
tertiary camera is only used at the climactic scene when rhinotaur comes into the cell, and is
placed in a corner near to the floor, looking up, for a dramatic effect. The fourth and fifth
cameras are centered on the cell door's window and are reverse angles to each other, or the
door-in and door-out cameras, though they only appear in the animatic.
When placing the cameras I aimed for a variation of techniques. Constraint was more
important than experimentation, but all camera techniques I know of were considered. At
the end of the day I didn't want the camera to become an audience-independent actor in
the film, but to be an invisibly present conveyor of the story. Below is a breakdown of the
camera techniques considered for the film.
i.
The reverse angle shot. The bars of the cell door is used as a frame for various
activities in the story, and is the visual anchor for the only reverse angle shot applied.
Some times the bars are seen from the perspective of the cell, other times from the
perspective of the outside hallway. Though interspaced by other shots and scenes, I
count this as a reverse angle shot, since the camera angles applied are pointed
directly 180 degrees and opposite from each other.
ii.
Inserted shots. I planned inserted shots to better explain the trajectory of the potion
when the dryad catches it, so as to make sure the viewer doesn't miss important
details that happen in a small portion of an established frame.
iii.
Long-shots. Full body long-shots are the main staple of the camera-work, and the
film's two main cameras are both set up to portray long-shots of the dryad as she
explores her cell. In particular, the primary camera is set up to have dryad explore
the full horizontal width of the film's 16:9 ratio.
iv.
Wide shots. A wide shot is usually used at the beginning of a new area, to establish a
location for the viewer. It may for instance zoom from birds eye towards the events
of the action. In the case of this project, the entire film takes place inside of a
claustrophobic set, so there really was no room for en establishing wide shot. The
above mentioned long shots already expanded into as much of the available space as
possible. Many a time throughout production I wish I had had the time to create an
external shot of the prison cell, to allow for an establishing shot and to have
somewhere external for the camera to go when the sound effects inside the cell
spike (such as when the slab of stone drops on Dryad's foot).
v.
Jump cuts. Jump cuts have been avoided, as it is the narrative of a story that is being
attempted in the film, and jump cuts seem more the realm of documentary
14
interviews, or playful time lapses. Jumps in the timeline have been experimented
with, such as when dryad spends so long in the cell that she eventually freaks out,
but since the camera rests while the character glitches in time, I guess this would be
more of a related technique instead of a true jump cut.
vi.
Medium shots. Half-body medium shots have largely been avoided. There isn't much
standing still in the film, or furniture to hide behind, where I find such shots to be
prevalent.
vii.
Dollies. I applied no moving cameras to the film. On such a small set there wasn't
much room to create tracks for a dolly anyhow. I could perhaps have done this for
dryad when she finally escape her cell and followed her sideways as she runs down
the hallway towards freedom, but that would imply further action and more
obstacles, rather than conclusion and freedom.
viii.
Over-the-shoulder camera. I did experiment with some over-the-shoulder cameras
during production, such as when rhinotaur enters the cell and finally looks behind
him to discover where dryad is hiding, but these were eventually omitted.
ix.
Close-ups. Close-ups were in the storyboards/animatic only applied to reveal partial
detail of a creature whose full shape is yet unseen (rhinotaur). More use of extreme
close-ups could have been applied to help the miniature size of handheld screens
convey facial emotes, as well as underline Dryad's emotional state as she experiences
the horrors of confinement, but I didn't want the film to be too gloomy in mood
either, so avoided this. Time-budget was also a factor in omitting this.
x.
Dutch angle/tilt. A slight tilt was added to most shots, to avoid parallel lines between
the squarish cell structure and the screen edges. This makes the image more organic,
softening up the inherent squareness of the screen. In short, it makes the somewhat
boxy scene more interesting, though not applied in amounts that might induce
queasiness.
xi.
Camera view-lines. The cameras' view-lines and their relation to the audience was
always observed and kept simple, so as not to disorientate the viewer. In effect this
means always keeping the cell door, the warden, and dryad's freedom to the left of
the main camera, and a confining yet enticing dead-end to the right. Other camera
angles were introduced along the same logic, gradually easing the viewer into the
new camera's relative location to the primary camera. Dryad's freedom is eventually
gained when she manages to reverse her own position with that of the warden's in
relation to these locations.
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4) Tools
Hardware
The storyboards were drawn in 3x3 panels on seven A2 sheets of paper, using a large
black pencil for panel frames and a soft lead pencil & eraser for panel content. After the
story boards had been digitized, most work was done at a stationary home PC and various
stationary campus PCs. Rig features included the usual mouse and keyboard, an
indispensible 3D navigator, a digital camera, dual monitors, light-pen, tablet and a
microphone. A graphics card that runs contemporary videogames.
Storyboard
sheet 1 of 7.
Software
Initially, a story treatment for the film was written using Word. Once the storyboards
were done, they were digitized and color/contrast treated with Photoshop Elements.
Premiere was then used to piece together an animatic from the storyboard panels. The
sounds assembled for the animatic were first treated in Audacity.
At home I worked with 3D Studio Max 2010 (out of the Autodesk Education Suite for
Entertainment Creation 2010 package) and Photoshop Elements 6.0 to create 3D and 2D
assets. At campus the I've used 3D Studio Max 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 as they were
upgraded, plus various versions of Photoshop CS and Adobe Premiere. I used the website
creation service Weebly to create and maintain the project blog, located at
www.monstercute.com.
16
5) Sizes
Screen resolution
16:9 has become the current platform for HDTV, whereas 4:3 used to be a more
common format for online and TV media. From the beginning of the project I've kept two
main priorities - compatibility with the portable handheld platform and upwards
compatibility to HDTV. I've therefore opted for the 16:9 format. The two polar opposites I've
been testing and rendering to throughout the visual production has been 720x405 at the
portable-sized end, and 1920x1080 for HDTV. This has presented a number of challenges for
the graphics production, but has made the project data much more dynamic for future
pathways, as described in the project rules.
Texture resolution
Though familiar with texture production I've tried to keep the number of textures for
the project at a minimum. This is to reduce the risk of having an unwieldy number of files to
keep updated and having to move them between the home workspace and the university
workspace.
The aim has been to create a few highly detailed textures that can be applied in
numerous ways, rather than to create a custom texture for every last object in the scene.
The pixel resolution of each object has been gauged individually, but as a general rule, the
current default texture size is 1600x1600 pixels.
My personal style of texturing usually contains a fair amount of hand-placed noise, or
grain, which I find helps my eye connect to the object. The visual style of the textures has
been marked by the duality of aiming both for the small-scale portable formats and HD.
Though high resolution, I've restrained the amount of figurative detail in the textures and
tried to keep the definitions abstract and clear to the eye. Large nondescript texture surfaces
have been willfully avoided, as a matter of artistic preference.
Texture file types
The texture format of choice for the project has been PNG, because it is lossless and
alpha-channel compatible. JPGs, while fast and size efficient, are not lossless and can with a
bad stroke of the save button, or software-dependent save method, end up badly disfigured
by the file type's scalable compression methods. For in-progress work files, the 2D program's
native PSD files were applied, indispensible for its multi layer-compatibility.
Polygon budgeting
Minimalism, within reason. A low number of polygons not only ensures the
essentiality of a good framerate while working, but also reduces the amount of visual clutter
and retinal strain that comes with continuously working with a loaded object and maximum
screen resolutions. Especially important with a model that is to undergo heavy UV
unwrapping, such as the case was with rhinotaur's head and body, as well as dryad's head.
When unwrapping UVs, every last square is likely to need some hand-tweaking to look its
best. Thus, going from medium to high polygon counts on a creature makes the task of UV
unwrapping it exponential, quickly becoming unmanageable if proper restraint is not shown.
17
The set's main piece,
the cell, seen from the
secondary camera.
6) The set
Modeling
Care has been taken to ensure all objects, such as the cell bricks, are unique to the
camera even though they may appear identical at first glimpse. They should rather appear as
part of one mass than individual shapes. This has been attempted through applying slight
shape variations to a set of default shapes that form
along a common arching curve. The sets have been made
to appear subtle rather than to take center stage, to
allow the two rigs to come to the front of the picture.
Subdued colors have been applied to most prop textures
in order to let the creature colors shine, and to allow
vaguely colored lighting to show its variation.
No time was spent producing props without a
storytelling function, and even props that had a place in
the story, such as the cell bed, are as much as possible
camouflaged to be an organic part of the cell mass,
rather than demanding the attention of the viewer.
Lighting
There are intentionally very few dominant light sources in the scene. The two main
lights is the bluish moonlight from the east, and the warm torch-glow from the hallway to
the west. In addition the dryad continuously emits a little light wherever she goes, unless she
is willfully hiding it. The idea has been that the dryad's light gets stronger the more energy
she exhausts, such as when she pounces the warden. When she sleeps, the self-illumination
is faint, but brightens as she wakens. The lighting types chosen has been a blend between
standard, and the more detailed "photometric" variation available in the 3D tool, which
allows for whiteout highlights on textures.
18
7) Rhinotaur
Polygon budgets were initially kept stringent for the rhinotaur, with the first
maximum set to 5000. This budget was increased when polygon-heavy features such as
gums, teeth and detailed hands were added. Currently the polycount for the rhinotaur's
body, head and eye meshes total just over 6000. Techniques applied during modeling
include edge-looping (admittedly rudimentary), square-turning to optimize polygon surfaces
and much fine-tuning of vertices - flying low over the models' surface with the 3D navigator.
I've created several videogame landscapes during my time in the games industry and often
felt my modeling and texturing approach to rhinotaur was more landscape-like than
anatomy-based, but I am not sure whether this actually is discernible in the final result.
The skin texture for the rhinotaur was one of the biggest undertakings of the project,
as this creature is meant to stand out in expansively detailed contrast to the dryad's smooth
elegant yet detached lines. The idea was to gradually reveal small portions of the rhinotaur's
details, before a big "unveiling" at the final confrontation. Several iterations of the skin were
completed and the final version count landed at version 41. The texture measures
4800x4800 in size and was based on various animal photography, like rhino, alligator, frog,
elephant and horse. It features custom bump and specular layers, which add better sense of
depth and highlights to the finished model.
As specular- and bump- maps are derivatives of the diffuse textures, I waited as long
as I could before embarking on the custom-painting that best takes advantage of these
texture effects. Before the custom textures became independent branches, I simply desaturated the diffuse texture and quickly edited levels to get a workable, though nonoptimized result. Holding back on the divergence of specs and bumps until the diffuse is
done saves the exponential loss of time that follows having to upkeep three separate
19
textures, whenever there is a need for the root texture to be improved. Artists who use
normal-maps to derive their bumps from a high-poly model escape this consideration, but I
have yet to model a truly high-poly character myself, opting to bake-paint photographic
reference onto a medium poly model to achieve high-detail results.
Chronologically the rhinotaur creation process went like this:
i.
Head texturing. Texturing first, before drawing a concept, is generally thought of as
doing things the wrong way round. Much like pouring milk before the cereal (or the
bowl even), but in this case I felt I knew enough about texturing from my years as an
environment artist to make an educated guess of how the rhinotaur's head UVs
might map. Most importantly though, I was at the mercy of the available
photographic material, and so pick and mixed from the available reference sources
until I had a seamless collage that might map over a rhino-like skull. Had I modeled
the head first, I might have run into problems like texture-stretching over the areas
where no photographic reference existed. As the project evolved, my texturing
technique improved to where I could better fill in such gaps by sampling parts of the
photos unto where information was missing, but I was at the start not yet confident
enough with my texturing to think of this, and was very mindful of keeping as much
as possible of the available surface structure of the rhino skin intact. I might have
done this differently had I begun today, but I'm still sure that the preciousness with
which I at first treated the original photo source's content helped shape the
rhinotaur in a positive way. Even after I was done reverse-baking the rhinotaur
texture, much of the photographic reference's distinctive detail was retained, like
face wrinkles.
20
ii.
iii.
iv.
Concept Drawing. I've drawn several concepts of rhino-men over the years, but this
was the first time I did it methodically with the aim of creating a 3D model. I also had
the texture rough in mind. Thus, I made frontal and profile drawings and imported
these as bitmap blueprints into the 3D tool.
Modeling. Once the concepts of
side- and front- were placed 90
degrees from each other I could
begin sculpting. I modeled a
trace around the contours of
the two concepts, continually
comparing front- and profileresults to ensure the sculpting
stayed within the confines of
each view. Once this trace was
completed, the main sculpting
was mostly done and all that
remained was much tweaking
to get the model looking organic
and meaty, while adhering to
edgeloop techniques. The same
method was applied to a
separate concept of the rhinotaur's physique, taking a drawing I had made earlier,
depicting super-heroic anatomical male proportions and modifying it to fit the assets
created so far.
Body texturing. After the head model was done I was happy to find that the early
texture fit onto the model without needing too much modification. I then embarked
on the body texture, working in multiple layers, where a human bodybuilder was part
of the base, and layers of animal hide that fit onto the anatomical parts were
gradually added. I used as much as I could find of available rhinoceros photos, but
there were several hard to photograph parts of the body left without any, or good
enough reference, and I didn't want to begin hand-painting certain areas of the
texture, since this would have lead to disparate styles within the same texture map. I
began looking for other animal hides that might be modified to match the look of the
available rhino textures and eventually got by through applying patches of lizard
21
v.
vi.
vii.
viii.
(arms, hands, back ridge), frog (back, shoulders), elephant (feet, horn) and got some
key missing elements thanks to the horse (soles, gums). Let it be said that it can
certainly be a tad morbid patching a creature together using photographic material.
After a while I sometime started feeling like a digital taxidermist and had to do
something else for a while.
Body Rigging. Using the 3D tool's prefab rigging system (biped, previously known as
character studio) I made my first working animation rig with the rhinotaur model,
rhinotaur v1. Certain modeling imperfections in relation to animation were now
discovered, but the result ended up workable and it was rewarding to see rhinotaur
slug around drunk, dance and perform martial arts moves, through use of the biped
system's built-in motion capture support.
Head rigging. Following on the completion of the body rig I opted to go for a
morphtarget based facial animation system, as opposed to a controller-based one.
The finished result has full lipsynch support and includes a variation of mixable
moods and grimaces.
Re-modeling. In retrospect I could have benefitted from streamlining the body even
more at this stage, to get a more dynamic animation rig in version 2, but I prioritized
remedying rhinotaur v1's biggest flaw - four fingered hands. I had modeled him with
four fingers in an attempt to differentiate him from the standard human anatomy,
but the end result just wasn't very appealing or believable, and there was no hiding it
was a bit of a rush job. The five fingered hands ended up satisfactory and I made
some other minor adjustments to the model, before signing it off to a
Scaling the
fellow student with superior rigging
rhinotaur's mesh
skills.
to match the
Re-rigging the body. With the help from
dryad's MAX rig
bones.
Alexander Edvard Fusdahl the
rhinotaur's body rig was brought up to
version 2. Besides possessing a more
elegant controller-setup to that of the
biped's somewhat clunky bones,
Fusdahl's version reflected better
weighting technique, allowing for
improved anatomy deformation. My
modeling for animation technique was
still showing gaps, but for the purpose
of the storyboards, the rig could now
perform all planned actions without
show stopping glitches. Most
importantly, version 2 of the rhinotaur
22
ix.
x.
allowed for curve tangents to be set to step in the 3D tool, a feature missing from the
character studio feature set. With the event of version 2, proper animation blocking
became possible, vastly increasing the potential for the quality of the finished
animations. During this stage the rhinotaur rig's bones were made to match the MAX
rig's bones, which are the foundation of the dryad rig.
Re-texturing. The patched photographic references applied to the rhinotaur wasn't a
flawless technique by any means. Upon scrutiny the texture was showing
inconsistency in lighting angles and in the sense of texture baking, a rather
charbroiled look. The dimly lit surface was full of gorgeous details, but contained
limited color variation, sprawling bitmap levels and couldn't be brightened to the
desired saturation without losing realism. Most notable was the lack of dynamicity in
response to varying lighting conditions, due to the photo reference's relatively sharp
highlights and deep shadow. Though he might have served the project needs just fine
as he was I opted to go down the long road of attempting to make the humongous
texture more dynamic. A lighter, more colorful texture would allow the character to
be more visible against the background, a stated project goal in particular in relation
to handheld platform's limited screen sizes, and more than likely teach me a thing or
two about texturing, which it did. Reverse-baking the texture, I lit up the skin by
getting rid of large patches of indiscernible mass, dampened the brightest highlight
ridges and remapped the texture geometry to better follow the flow created by the
edgeloops. Many favorite details from the original photos had to be deconstructed in
favor of an even noise level across the brightening surface. An entire re-working of
the UV coordinates was also necessary in order to minimize the visibility of the
texture seams, which became more prone to be noticed as the texture began
brightening up. This UV remapping was branched off at version 26 of the skin. Once I
had achieved a result I was content with for the diffuse texture (a month long
focused effort), I then diverged the bump and specular textures, touching them up
and hand-painting the necessary areas to bring out the best result achievable in each
effect.
Future upgrades. If I were to continue working on the rhinotaur model I would up the
polygon count to about 10.000, allowing for better weighting and mesh deformation
during animation. The texture detail can certainly stand a doubling of the polycount.
I'm not in a hurry to have the character rigged a third time though.
23
8) Dryad
The creation of dryad is an entirely different story from that of
the rhinotaur. In the original story treatment, the prisoner was
described as a boy, but time constraints would have it otherwise. A
creature that would match the theme already defined by the
rhinotaur was needed. I looked at the resources of my model libraries and found nothing
fitting the description of "boy". I did however have the fruits of my labor with Michel Roger's
Joan of Arc tutorial, which depicts the stylized figure of a young woman. The MAX rig was
already being put to good use during study animation exercises and was fast becoming the
animation rig with which the most dynamic results could be achieved. I thus had the idea of
attaching the Joan of Arc physique to the MAX rig's powerful bones. Doing this would save
valuable time in omitting the need for modeling and rigging a second character from scratch,
and allow the use of a highly popular rig's mechanics, with which I was already fairly familiar.
Good animation rigs are delicate structures that can collapse like houses of cards if
their internal structures are meddled with, so it was understood that there was no
guarantee of these newfound intensions producing workable results. Doubt crept in and
hopes became low after the initial rush of the idea's prospects.
It was quickly realized that certain compromises would have to be made to the
original Joan of Arc model, as the MAX rig's body-bones largely aren't weighted meshes, but
rigid primitives that follow the basics of a human physique (and are later procedurally
morphed by built-in squash and stretch). In short, my mesh of Joan would have to be broken
into individual limb-pieces that would later be grafted onto the MAX rig's bones. This would
inherently leave the finished dryad rig with a differing look from the one-piece mesh of the
rhinotaur. However, after rigging rhinotaur I knew that getting a one-piece mesh to do the
kind of acrobatics the story asked of the protagonist, was a tall order by any standards.
Eventually weighing in dynamic animation-capability heavier than seamless mesh looks, the
decision was made to attempt fitting the Joan of Arc mesh's parts onto the MAX rig's bones
and explain its disjointed look by giving the protagonist's role to a female wooden doll-like
24
creature, instead of a boy. This creature
fantastique would be thematically compatible
with the rhinotaur and its differing visuals serve to
support the proposed background origins.
By attaching the Joan of Arc limb pieces
onto the existing MAX rig bone meshes and then
deleting the vertices that belonged to the
previous shape, I was eventually able to do a successful graft. It was a delicate process and I
had to do it twice due to a judgment error in how to begin the grafting. The first time
around, I positioned the MAX rig over the existing X-shaped Joan of Arc pose and began
grafting (dryad version 1, dubbed "Maxine"). The resulting rig would when animating show
mesh deformations in the areas where Joan's pose differed from MAX's default T-pose. The
second time around I used MAX's T-pose as anchor point and fitted the Joan of Arc mesh
pieces unto it (dryad version 2 and onwards). This time the rig animated without any mesh
deformation, even if a little of the femininity evident in version 1 was lost.
The applicable rig structure was simplified some along the way, reducing the number
of spine joints and removing weighted-mesh parts, such as the shoulders and head, since
there was no way to apply new weight modifiers onto
the grafted pieces. Strangely, some half-descent
weighting values were inherited onto the grafted torso
mesh, which can take slight modifications and still show
good mesh deformation. For the dryad's head, I went
for a more naturalistic look than that of the MAX rig and
created my own set of morphtarget emotes.
Texturing dryad
As with modeling and rigging, a completely
different philosophy from that of the rhinotaur was
applied when texturing dryad. Only the head of the
dryad required the precise mapping that goes with UV
unwrapping the fine features of a human face. By
comparison though, rhinotaur's head, with its horn, ears
and many interwoven wrinkles, was a lot more work.
The polished wood of the dryad's body are all
dressed through the use of the simple primitive
texturing projection modifier UV map. This was initially
done as a visual test, but since the results were
satisfactory, I was glad to leave the texturing at the
relatively featureless polished look they have today.
The most demanding aspect of texturing dryad's
body was positioning the texture in such a way as to not
have the wood's age lines hint at any anatomy features
that weren't already present through sculpting the
model. It became a balancing act of keeping the woodtexture's year-rings subtle enough so as not to look like
folds or wrinkles and not so under-pronounced as to
lose the appearance of wood. The supernatural element
25
to set her apart from a human girl was further accented by the inclusion of leaf-like hair and
limbs sprouting leaf.
Dryad's limbs are all mapped with the same wooden texture, sized 1600x2400. For
the head texture, I was granted the use of a picture of my sister as a base, a touch that
added a closeness to the subject and was valuable in causing me to treat the source material
with reverence. For the Dryad's limbleaves, I went for a "cardboard cut-out" technique that
serves as a better alternative to the opacity textured leaves I tried initially. Instead of using
an alpha channel to define the leaves' edges, I would stitch-model around the seam of the
leaf texture to get a much more solid-looking and elegantly rendering leaf. I used a
combination of two leaf textures for the limbleaves, measuring 800x1600 for the most
foremost leaves in the sets of three and 1600x1600 for the larger backmost leaf. In addition,
the matching headpiece measures
1600x1200. The positioning of such a large
apparel as the limbleaves will always be
problematic when animating an acrobatic
character. The limbleaves were planned to
enter into where the kinetic movement of
the human body leaves empty spaces,
outwards from the elbows and sideways
outwards from the knees. The end result was
quite satisfactory, with only a minimum
amount of effort necessary to avoid notable
polygon clipping.
Early apparels
Even though I decided early on in the process of creating dryad that she shouldn't
have conventional clothing, I couldn't help doing some apparel tests along the way to see
what worked. Pictured below are some of the clothing tests, that in the end only served to
confirm my notion of keeping the characters free of fashion indicators.
26
9) Audio
Sound effects
About half of the sound effects for the project were gathered from freesound.org. A
select few were downloaded and purchased from sounddogs.com. The rest I recorded with a
microphone. A background layer of ambient sounds is audible most of the time, to add body
and atmosphere to the scene. Some conditional soft sound effects are added, depending on
the characters' perception vicinities, such as the sound of the ocean when dryad is near the
cell window.
My sound studio was in effect a duvé, which I threw over the computer rig desk while
recording the various guttural "dialogue" noises emitted by the two characters. The blanket
served quite well to muffle external sound effects. The recorded voice effects were pitched
and sped up to portray dryad's voice. To portray rhinotaur the sounds were pitched down,
stretched out and boosted for extra bass.
Soundtrack
I decided to omit the inclusion of a soundtrack for the film, in order to heighten the
sense of loneliness in the cell, bring the tempo down to increase the anticipation of the film's
climactic scene and make space for ambience and hard point effects. After all, silence is also
a sound effect.
27
10)
Animation
Disney's animation principles
The animation principles from Disney's The Illusion's of Life have been part of our
curriculum. Following is a look at their application when compared to the project's course.
i. Squash and stretch. One of the reasons I chose the laborious task of re-fitting the
MAX rig was because it had such an excellent rubber-band limb mechanics. Limbs
and spines each have a stretch modifier that maps to the animation timeline and can
be set to morph the model beyond its inherent three dimensional ramifications. The
rhinotaur lacks this function, but isn't as acrobatic a character to begin with, so this
might in the end actually help to further contrast the two actors. The extreme
deformations evident in conventional 2D squash and stretch is time consuming to
reproduce in 3D and one-mesh rigs like the rhinotaur quickly loses its volume when
contorted.
ii. Anticipation. My initial animations didn't have enough anticipation. After taking
some cues, reading up on the subject and checking out practical examples, the use of
anticipation was much improved in the final animations. As a note, videogames is a
medium where immediacy of player control is a leading principle that often comes at
the expense of traditional anticipation animations. This may well have affected my
application of this principle.
iii. Staging. In the storyboards, I considered staging through changing camera angles to
show dryad's thought patterns, as she begins thinking her way out of the cell. After I
had made complete animation sequences I would reconsider the preset camera
angle from the storyboards to further improve staging and make sure the actions in
the scene read well.
iv. Straight-ahead vs. pose to pose. Continuously blending the two techniques. I
blocked out all animations before I finalized them, so there is an amount of pose-topose in all of them. There were certain situations when I didn't know how to resolve
a storyboard sequence as hands-on animation until I got to grips with it, such as
showing how dryad would actually overcome rhinotaur once he steps into the cell.
These situations were then done straight-ahead once the characters were in place,
and the exact ramifications of the surrounding geometry were known (such as a
corner of the room meeting a curving door that swings open to an widening monstermouth that should fit a bottle). Much of the rewarding work for me as an animator
happened when these problems had to be solved on the fly, and I think the best
animations achieved came as a result of them. They were of course, also the result of
being the climactic scenes in the story.
v. Follow-through and overlapping action. Effects of gravity, friction and collision was
always considered. There is a lot of overlapping action when the two characters clash
together, particularly seen on rhinotaur when dryad uses him as gym bars. There is
not so much overlapping seen in the animations when the two are apart, though
dryad's leaf appendages were sometimes adjusted as a result of follow-through. Like
squash-and-stretch, this is a principle that seems more time efficient to apply with
pen and paper than with computers and polygons. The film's lack of hanging clothes
and moving drapery is also a factor. The hand-painted smoke effects show a lot of
overlapping action, as the smoke plume contorts around the actors moving within it.
28
vi.
vii.
viii.
ix.
x.
xi.
Slow in and slow out. As the project started to mature, an increased focus on this
aspect emerged, to best explain the most important actions and to avoid just rushing
through the keyframes one by one. Eventually, this lead to certain sequences
becoming much longer than initially anticipated. Examples include giving the
rhinotaur enough time to look about the entire cell for the missing dryad and giving
dryad enough time to believably go from fully asleep to wide awake.
Arcs. I frequently accessed the curves editor to improve arcs, but since this can be
time consuming in the middle of the workflow I frequently got workable results from
strategically placing animation keyframes directly before or after an event that
needed better break-down. The exact curves can always be cleaned up later if need
be, rather than jumping into curve editor every time, which can break the stride of
the animating.
Secondary action. Examples of applied secondary action that underlines the main
animation include the spasms of rhinotaur's musculature when he's exhaling the
potion intake and dryad scratching here and there as a result of regaining control of
her motor functions when waking up.
Timing. Timing is of course a broad subject that permeates all parts of animation, but
to follow up on the Disney text's example (p.65) of variance in frames density, I found
the one element where my work followed the text was in animating the 2D smoke. I
changed animation output from 30fps to 24fps at one stage in the project, to
accommodate the 2D animation, which changed the exact timing of the entire
animation I had done thus far, forcing some re-iteration of sequences where
animation keys had been stacked tight. An example of the latter is when rhinotaur's
knees become wobbly as he begins losing consciousness. Once I went from 30 fps to
24, the 3D program was no longer rendering out the curve peak of the animation,
resulting in a jelly-like wobble rather than a precise vibrating shivering. The default
pace of the 2D smoke effect was 12fps, or every other frame, but I found I could get
much improved results by increasing the 2D animation rate to the full 24fps around
certain key events. The sequences where the 2D smoke went on ones instead of
twos, include: 1) Whenever the smoke fits closely around the actors silhouettes as
they get enveloped in it. 2) When something fast happens, like when dryad jumps
from bed to rhinotaur's neck. 3) Smoke gets small/detailed, like when smoke is
exiting the rhinotaur's nostrils.
Exaggeration. I'm generally of a mind that this principle is waning as animation is
maturing and graphics are becoming loaded with HD detail. Too stringent adherence
to this principle may lead to animator-centric (as opposed to animation-centric) cases
of overacting. Exaggeration was probably laid down as a principle for the early 2D/3D
animators to bridge the gap between the spartan information of an animated
line/primitive and realism, but as photorealism is now a part of the animator's
toolset, old-school exaggeration no longer has the same application and often seems
overused. I've tried to load the characters with enough detail that budgeted
movement will gradually reveal enough detail to keep the viewer's attention.
Extreme examples of this form of subtle animation exaggeration include the
videogame Shadow of the Colossus' climbable colossi, God of War's titans, and the
feature film Inception's folding city scene.
Solidity. A direct comparison with the project's work methods to this 2D-rooted
principle is hard, as I didn't concept a lot of the character work before I began,
29
xii.
knowing that the 3D result would differ. However, a lot of time was spent to get the
shape and detail level of the characters just right, so that they would have the right
amount of contrasting form. Rhinotaur would be slow, coarse and grainy while dryad
would be fast, smooth and soft. Rhinotaur would be dark and heavy, while as dryad
would be light and limber. I also remained conscious of avoiding twins in the renderoutput's character silhouette, adjusting camera angles and the animations
themselves to always retain dynamic poses.
Appeal. The characters should have charisma. I've tried to avoid surface cartoony
sweetness and instead opted for semi-realism. The two leads are troubled characters
that should possess an underlying sense of appeal, searching for liberation from the
dark cloud that follows them around. Whether this has been successfully portrayed is
not my place to say, but the characters have been charismatic enough for me that
I've endured working with them for a number of years, and I still don't believe I've
managed to render out every facet of their inherent personalities.
30
11)
Conclusion
11a) Project plan vs. final result
I've become a more practiced animator during the project and the final animations
turned out more vivid than what I first had hoped for. Though I had imagined a more
cartoony style for the final result, the nature of the assets' base in photographic reference
concluded the final characters to a style that required a more measured animation pace. For
example, going from horizontal to sitting up in the Waking Up scene took about a second in
the 2D animatic, but proved to take closer to 30 seconds to portray convincingly with the
finished 3D assets.
To my surprise, as animations were completed, the final impact of some ideas that
had seemed harmless on paper, read more painful than intended once they were realized,
such as when the rhinotaur imbues the glass bottle. This is partly due to the realistic look
and textures applied, which yield a less cartoony results than what you might expect from
3D aimed at a young audience, or old school 2D cartoons such as Warner Brothers' Tom &
Jerry. I tried combating this sometimes jarring realness by softening up visuals and soundeffects. In the end, I was happy with the result, though I suspect some of the audience's
sympathy for dryad gets shifted to rhinotaur after she forces him to chew on splinters. The
events clearly take place inside a fantasy world, but still.
The project has allowed me to continue to stake out a personal visual style. There
have been new strides made within animation visuals since this project began, such as
Nickelodeon's Rango (2011) feature, showing that gritty characters deeply rooted in real-life
reference are a viable option to the plush 3D standard. I have shown that I can animate with
a modicum of subtleness and flamboyancy, depending on what the scene requires. Through
the fine margins of rhinotaur and dryad's interaction with each other and the surroundings
to which they are shown to be acquainted, I've depicted animations that are outside that of
what videogame controllers allow a real time player character to do, thereby reaching my
goal of going beyond my background in videogames.
The two most noticeable faults that become apparent when comparing the final
result with the original project description, is 1) the lack of a complete story arc and 2) the
duration of the animations totaling in at a minute and a half, rather than the two minute
minimum that was originally set. As it is, the artifact does not fully work as an independent
cohesive story that's easy to read. Several unexplained elements are present in the second
section, such as where dryad's bottle came from and why the rhinotaur is coming through
the door at the moment dryad is hiding behind it. It is possible for audiences to relate to the
basic fact of being imprisoned and successfully breaking out, but more work is needed
before a complete short animated film can be said to have been produced.
The project rules that were staked out at the start have been adhered to.
11b) Practical lessons learnt during production
It's a good idea to always check block animations against gimbal lock before calling
them done. I had to wrestle with this technical hurdle of 3D animation as it unexpectedly
reared its head from time to time. Some of the animation blocking sequences I started off
with when animating commenced, proved to have rotations impossible to bridge. I am still
31
not affluent enough to know how to fully avoid gimbal locks, but I've come to understand
that rotating the controllers more than 90 degrees between block animations seem risky.
Smaller steps or finer increments between individual block frames seem a good idea for
future work.
Don't set too many keys. Setting all keys on one of my animation rigs to a frame costs
about 40k of data storage space. Not much in itself, but still a cause for caution when
considering potential curve edit backlash and that file iterations and key sets number into
the hundreds and thousands.
The 2D plume effects took a hefty part of the budgeted time. I might have achieved
more scenes with 3D character animation if I had omitted the 2D, but the escape scene
would have had much less of an impact without the plume, and the longer I worked on it,
the more the gaseous plume became a character in itself, reacting to the movements of the
two characters. It eventually seemed to take on a life of its own. I am happy with the end
result of this, my first foray into 2D animation that ranges into hundreds of frames (496 to
be exact). I am also convinced that I couldn't reproduce the effect in 3D, and happy that it
may help to make the project's style appear less colored by 3D videogames.
The Escape scene ended up totaling in at 473 file iterations, while Waking Up only
took 135 different saves.
The technology segment for animation, having been relatively stable from the 1930's
through to the 1980's, now continues to move quickly within 3D. It is hard to make graphics
that can check all hardware-advancing flags. I focused my efforts more on maturing the rigs
within the technological paradigm in which they were born, rather than trying to add on
every new render method that appeared along the way.
Though it is challenging and limiting to work alone, having complete editorial control
of the project contents has been enjoyable.
32
12)
Appendix 1 - Terminology
Baking - In the context of texturing, creating soft gradients across the texture surface to
emulate lighting detail and highlight bump/specular map effects, such as creases in clothing.
Also, reverse-baking - taking photographic material whose light-direction is too strong to
yield convincing render results and neutralizing it towards softer gradients.
Edgelooping - I am no master modeler, but I understand enough about edgelooping to
conclude the following. One, all polygons on the model must be squares. No triangles, no
hexagons, etc. This is to ensure optimal render results and minimize the chance of glitches
on the mode's surface come render-time, as well as ensure predictable deformation of the
mesh once it is animating.
Gimbal lock - Superfluous rotations on a controller that results in the object's rotational
development becoming arrested.
Limbleaf - The closest thing dryad has to "clothing" - large green leaves that grow from her
wrists and ankles, outwards parallel to the under-arm/leg upwards towards the knee/ankle.
Placed to cause a minimum of intersection with the body's general movement-mechanics,
such as is often the case with typical human clothing, like skirts, robes, gloves or anything
that covers the shoulders of the animation rig.
Macguffin - An object that drives the story onwards. Usually without any meaning in itself,
the MacGuffin is a chameleon that could just as well be any other thing of equal class. Gem =
jewellery = money = wealth = power, etc. Coined by Alfred Hitchcock. The suitcase with the
golden glow, but otherwise unknown contents in Pulp Fiction (Miramax, 1994) is a
Macguffin.
Polygon - The colored (and, if render-enabled, usually textured) surface between three
points.
Skinning - In the context of 3D modeling - creating a UV texture.
Square - In the context of 3D modeling - two adjoined polygons that share a common line.
UV mapping - Quick texturing
technique for primitives with
parallels, such as squares and
cylinders. The name of the
relevant object modifier in the
3D tool is UV map.
UV unwrapping - Folding a
square texture surface around
an irregular and/or organically
shaped object. The name of the
corresponding modifier in the
3D tool is Unwrap UVW.
Vertex - A point. If animated,
also a vector.
2D tool - The project's chosen
2D tool was various versions of Adobe Photoshop. Used to create textures, largely applying
photographic source material as base. The program was chosen because I have many years
of familiarity applying it to computer graphics and because it served all observed needs of
the project.
33
3D tool - The project's chosen 3D tool was various versions of 3D Studio Max, by Autodesk.
Used to create (or sculpt, model) polygons, apply textures, animate and record (or render)
the animation. I chose this program because I knew it was powerful enough to create
detailed assets and animations and otherwise hold the commercial prerequisites for
professional activity.
3D navigator - 3D space piloting tool that allows for a finer gradation of movement along the
XYZs of the 3D tool's environment. Replaces the, for this purpose, much cruder mouse-tool.
The 3D navigators used throughout this project were the stationary 3D Space Pilot, and the
portable 3D Navigator, both made by 3D Connexion. As a note - I highly recommend a 3D
navigator for anyone planning to spend years piloting 3D computer space, for the sake of
precision, polygon contiguity (to apply allegory - if the 3D subject was the moon, the 2D
mouse might be considered binoculars, while the navigator might be considered a
telescope), unlocking one's potential and maybe most
importantly - for health concerns. Over 12 years
working with a standard 2D mouse in 3D space
eventually left me with a right hand and shoulder in a
state of medicinal disrepair. Without a 3D navigator I
more than likely would have been unable to finish my
BA.
34
13)
Appendix 2 - Project origins
13a) Written Treatment
The below description is from the project's written treatment and storyboard phase.
The project has gone through a lot of changes since its inception and came about during my
second year of study, when we had an assignment to write a proposal for an animated film.
"The Thief
Main Cast: One young thief, one burly ogre. Optional Extras: a venerable prisoner, a young
girl and ambient life for the setting (rat, pigeon, spider). I will likely employ the rhinotaur as
the ogre to allow more time creating and animating the main character. I haven't quite
decided whether the young thief should be human, or... something weird and asymmetrical.
Environment: Prison. A fortress dungeon of large, roughly hewn stone, whittled by centuries
of use and vicinity to salty air. The scene limits itself to a straight corridor with two adjacent
cells. Each end of the corridor houses a small door-chamber. The inner door-chamber serves
as the guard's reading corner and extends into the unexplored depths of the fortress. The
outer door-chamber is the exit to the outside, blue skies and symbolic freedom. The main cell
has a window, leading to a sheer wall hanging over a cliffy shoreline.
Part 1, introduction:
A young boy is dragged kicking and screaming down a dark torch-lit corridor of roughly hewn
brick. A massive ogre with a large keychain has him by the scruff of his neck. At the end of
the corridor the boy is thrown into a damp and dark cell, and the The ogre, or rhinotaur's, reading corner was
dropped to minimize the size of the set and
door slams shut behind him. The ogre sits down to chew large
was not deemed necessary to tell the story.
knuckles with a crunchy sound, while reading a tattered book
titled "Cantrips".
Part 2, obstacles:
The boy immediately begins probing the cell for an escape. He
Though initially a boy, the main character
eventually wound up being a girl. This was
starts by pulling at the window-bars, realizes the window's
mostly due to my available assets, but it was
outside is very high up and instead tries to fit past the bar in the
also thought to add some tension to the
story.
door's window. After almost squishing his head he tries picking
the door's lock with a twig, but the twig breaks. He then tries downright ramming the door
down with his insufficient body mass, but bounces painfully to the floor a few times. Having
spent all his energy, he eventually falls asleep on the hay-filled floor.
Later in the dark dungeon, as the prison guard parades back and forth outside the door, the
boy contemplates how to make his escape. Getting one of the large bricks loose from the
35
wall, he ends up dropping it on his foot, creating a loud thud followed by an even louder
scream of pain. The prison guard arrives to see what's up, looks inside the cell, sees the boy is
trying to escape and chucks a small vial on the floor. The glass breaks causing a purple vapor
to fill the cell. Caught in the fumes, the boy quickly falls asleep, his last waking moment being
the locking of eyes with an ancient old captive on the other
Creating a third rig for the project would
side of the hole in the wall. When he wakes up, the hole in the have increased the necessary time need to
finish it drastically, so the neighboring
wall has been repaired. The remains of the broken vial are
prisoner was dropped and the story trimmed
down accordingly.
still in the cell, the larger piece being the part with the stillintact cork.
Days go by, and the frustration on the boy's face can be read clearly. More unsuccessful
escape attempts are made (as many of these as there are time for: 1) working out to become
big enough to break the door physically, 2) attaching a help! message to the foot of a
captured pigeon on the window-sill, 3) lowering himself out the window with a rope that's
too short to reach the bottom, etc.). Ultimately, a new idea emerges:
The kid picks lose another of the large stones, and waits for the loud thud of the rock to bring
the ogre about. When the ogre arrives, the boy feigns being caught-red-handed, keeping his
hands behind his back. The neighboring prisoner also pokes his head in through the hole,
with a surprised look. When the ogre sticks his hand through the window to chuck another
vial into the room, the kid is in slow motion seen to leap and catch the vial mid-air,
simultaneously chucking the remains of the previous vial onto the floor, so that the familiar
sound of breaking glass is heard. Next, the kid squeezes his head into the door's barred
window and feigns coughing, gasping and the eventual fainting. The ogre listens at the door
for a few seconds, before unlocking the cell and stepping inside. He is met by the kid's fist,
intact vial in hand, which punches the flask into the surprised ogre mouth. The kid then uses
both hands to close the prison guard's mouth, upon which a muffled sound of breaking glass
and chewing ice is heard. Purple smoke begins pouring out of the ogre's ears & nostrils, and
after making a few unexpected grimaces he collapses to the floor.
Part 3, resolution:
The kid drags, rolls and kicks the ogre's physique entirely into
the cell, locks the door behind him and runs down the corridor
towards freedom, chain of keys in hand. Black screen, followed
by credits.
The eventual big fall into the cell seemed a
more dramatic drop for the rhinotaur.
Besides, once the set and rigs were complete
it quickly became evident that there really
wasn't room for him to fall anywhere else!
After credits, the kid stops, just as he's reaching the exit of the dungeon, turns around to look
at the other end of the corridor, where the ogre guard used to sit. Contemplating a few
seconds, he then runs back past his old cell, to the ogre's chair, and quickly flips through the
entire book on cantrips. Next, a vial is dropped next to the sleeping ogre, and in a cloud of
red smoke the burly shape transforms into that of the boy. The polymorphed guard blinks his
eyes awake, and it is only through his sour grimace, bad posture and bright green eyes that it
36
is evident that the person on the inside of the cell is actually the ogre, and not the newly
escaped kid.
Finally, the kid runs down the corridor to freedom, only stopping briefly to unlock the door to
the venerable cellmate neighbor. The camera stays in the corridor, as the kid runs into the old
man's cell. Another vial is heard breaking, and the kid comes running out, with a beautiful
girl of his own age running alongside him. They escape at the end of the corridor, to the blue
skies waiting outside."
Another shot from Walt Disney Studio's Robin Hood
(1973).
37
13b) Project description
Included below is the text that was submitted to the project supervisor, early in the
third year of study:
"PR2 project description, Sverre Andre Kvernmo K0168770
The final product/artifact will be an animated short film with a minimum/maximum
duration of 2/4 minutes. It will feature a protagonist and an antagonist that share the
film's one set. The protagonist faces the problem of being incarcerated within the dark
and claustrophobic confines of a prison cell. The film's prison cell set currently exist as
finished props and is ready for production.
The film thematically employs a dark fairytale style and intends to explore in detail, a
small piece of a much larger tapestry and to hopefully make the viewer curious about the
sources of light beyond the doors and windows of the film. The film will conclude upbeat
but open-ended, where the tables have been turned but where the chase might still be
on to recapture the escaped prisoner. She could still be very far from home at the end of
the film, even though she has escaped the clutches of her captor.
The protagonist is a feminine woodland creature made from living, rootless wood. A free
roaming spirit, she doesn't physically resemble any established fairytale creature but is in
the project logs referred to as the dryad. She must explore her surroundings in detail and
find a way to outsmart he captor in order for the story to reach its conclusion. The dryad
currently exists as an animation rig and is ready for production.
The antagonist is a masculine beastlike creature, a muscled hulk with callous leather skin
and the horned head of a rhinoceros. He is a largely obscured throughout the film and is
only fully revealed towards the film's climactic sequence. Physically, he somewhat
resembles the minotaur of Greek myth, and so is referred to in the project logs as the
rhinotaur. The rhinotaur currently exists as an animation rig and is ready for production.
The visual style of the film will unavoidably be somewhat marked by my 15 years of
working with videogame graphics for the PC, but I'm not consciously trying to emulate a
videogame style. Rather, I'm using environment art creation methods I know from
videogames production coupled with the knowledge gathered on animation over the last
two years, to create a film with a unique visual expression.
The film will feature ambient and sound effects, but there is no verbal dialogue between
the two characters. I'd like the film to be understood equally across language barriers
and aim to let body language and situational circumstance dictate the unfolding story.
There are currently no plans to include music, but I'll reconsider the need for this during
post production.
The main bulk of the work and the focus for the project will be to create a story through
animation. All critical assets have already been made, and some preliminary blocking has
been set up, but no final animations have been produced as of yet.
I aim to provide a quality animated short film that showcase my abilities as an animator
38
for film, handheld media and videogames, with snappy captivating movement in
emotionally expressive characters of my own making. The tale should have a defined
start that sets the scene, an explorative middle that explores the problem and a
satisfying finale that teases for extension.
Tentative project timetable
--------------------------december - february: animation, blocking
january - june: animation, final
may - june: post production (sound, editing)
may - july: report
Links:
-----the rhinotaur rig:
http://www.sverror.com/1/post/2010/10/rhinotaur-rig-v135.html
the dryad rig:
http://www.sverror.com/1/post/2010/04/dryad-version-40.html
storyboard:
http://www.sverror.com/1/post/2010/02/the-thief-storyboards.html
animatic:
http://www.sverror.com/1/post/2010/02/the-thief-animatic.html"
39
13c) Project blog entries
Par for the course in the second year of study, was the inclusion of a study blog.
Listed below in reverse chronological order are the entries relevant to the final year project,
described in this report:
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2011/05/animations-from-bottled-dreams.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2011/03/practical-project-more-progress.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2011/02/animex-ahoy.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2011/02/360.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2011/01/project-report-sample.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/12/happy-2011.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/11/new-rhinotaur-uvs.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/11/its-tea-time.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/10/cca-six-poses.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/10/rhinotaur-rig-v135.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/10/ba-quest-year-3-day-18.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/06/sfx.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/06/animation-blocking-uploads.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/06/escaping-the-cell.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/05/camera-7.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/04/dryad-expressions.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/04/dryad-version-40.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/04/rhinotaur-rig-version-212.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/04/clothing-tests.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/04/inspiration.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/03/devil-may-care.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/03/dryad-v3.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/03/rhinotaur-v2.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/03/camera-05-testrender.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/02/the-thief-animatic.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/02/the-thief-storyboards.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/02/the-thief-main-cast.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/02/morehttpwwwweeblycomweeblymainphpmaxine-dryad.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/02/maxine-dryad.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/02/max-jean-darc-maxine.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/02/the-thief-titles.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/02/the-small-writing.html
http://www.monstercute.com/1/post/2010/01/the-thief-main-character.html
http://www.sverror.com/1/post/2010/01/sketches.html
http://www.sverror.com/1/post/2010/01/ideas-ideas.html
40
14)
Appendix 3 - UV texturing
This appendix takes a closer look at the technique of UV unwrapping the rhinotaur,
since this process has been the most time consuming part of graphics production for the
project. Unwrapping UVs, or skinning, requires a fair amount of patience and it isn't always
easy to give a firm deadline to when it is done to satisfaction, as glitches often become
gradually noticeable.
Texturing along the UV texture's seam
An organic UV map is bound to have a seam somewhere. A large part of the
challenge is how to make this seam invisible. This is an unwieldy part of the texture to
coordinate. It is a common technique to keep the entire skin of the model relatively smooth
and featureless to avoid the problems involved with texturing along the seam, but this also
limits the type of end result possible. For the rhinotaur, smooth skin was not an option, as I
wanted to achieve something the "natural armor" look of older rhinos.

Leaving room for overlap along either side of the seam edges. On a UV texture, visually
adjacent portions of the texture are often on opposite sides of the bitmap, meaning
certain artifacts won't be noticeable until the texture is applied to the model. With
machinery and edged armor the UV seams can be hidden in looped joints, but for a
continuously flowing beast-hide anatomy, more contiguous solutions apply. One
technique that helps bridge this gap is to copy-paste finished
Example of texture
texture portions from one side of the texture seam to the
detail that needed
other, but this requires available space in the always crowded
overlap to allow room
UV texture space.
for edge seam
maneuvering. UVs for
the rhinotaur's foot is
pictured.

No distinguishing features close to the seam. Pixel rotations will vary along the seam,
which is an automatic giveaway for the eye to notice that something's different where
this happens. This complicates the texturing process, making precise aligning and
catching unnatural patterns more difficult. It is therefore good methodology to have no
distinguishing features or strongly contrasting pixel clusters close to the UV's seam, as
the gradation of such features can't properly blend into the overall texture mass near to
a sharp line.
41



Avoiding mirror patterns. Texture mirror patterns will arise along the model's adjoining
middle- seam, when the most often necessary mirror modifier is applied to the model's
mesh. This can look unnatural and cause illusions of holes, tears, zits, lines and marks.
The middle-seam can be removed if the mirror modifier is collapsed, but to take
advantage of this necessitates available texture space, which isn't easy to plan for ahead
of time. Accomplishing this allows for distinguishing texture marks on either side of the
model's center line (e.g. a scar across one eye) and generally makes the model look
organic, asymmetrical and altogether more interesting. I have not had time to do this yet
for rhinotaur, as it would mean collapsing parts of its modifier stack and consequently
rigging the character a third time.
Model-adjacent seamedges that sit far apart
on the UV texture
should still be of the
same length.
Equal length edges on either side of the UV's seam. It is a good idea to
keep the seam's adjacent poly lengths as close to equal as possible,
lest pixel sizes becomes inconsistent along either side of the seam.
Having to adjust texture noise patterns and sizes to make up for differently sized UVedges is time consuming and un-elegant. To avoid this it becomes pertinent to keep track
of what square edges that correspond to each other and keep them as close to the same
length as possible.
As short a seam as possible. Minimize the amount of seams, particularly blocky edged
seams, like 90 degree bends. I had to go through many texture iterations to find the
optimal edge minimum for rhinotaur. Make sure you strategically place the seam where
it is least likely to be scrutinized, such as choosing the underside of the arm rather than
the shoulder-elbow path, follow the inside of the thighs rather than the outside, etc. All
edges that can be welded together without distorting the pixel distribution should be
welded. This might mean moving around portions of the texture to get the best fit.
Optimally, once the UV is done, it is one continuously flowing pangea, instead of
chopped up isolated sections. This ideal can be impossible to achieve, depending on the
amount of irregularity/concavity in the model worked on. For the rhinotaur, I had to
leave the elongated horn, the complex gums and the floppy ears isolated, not to distort
pixel distribution on the adjacent parts of the skin's surface. The body-portion of the
texture eventually ended up one contiguous pangea, after a major restructuring
performed at version 26 of the UV texture. The final texture version used for the film is
41.
Unwrapping UVs in 3D Studio Max
Software specific comments are generally being avoided throughout this report but
below are some time saving tips for UV-mapping in 3D Studio Max that might save an
aspiring UV artist oodles of time.
42



Texture size may affect UV coordinates. Beware that in the Unwrap UVW modifier's
object modes, such as the for this purpose all-important vertex mode, selected vertices
may when moved snap to the currently set texture size. You really don't want to lose the
positioning of those carefully placed edge vertices to a lower resolution grid, so do not
modify the UV coordinates until such a time that the UV texture's true resolution (or
higher) has been set. Even moving a single vertex in an inferior resolution may snap the
entire mesh' vertex collection to the coarser grid. 3D Studio Max does not remember the
Unwrap UVW modifier's preferences after you've collapsed the old modifier and applied
a new one, so the correct texture size must be set every time you apply a new UV
unwrap modifier.
Setting preferences in the correct order. Swapping in and out of the UV unwrap modifier
can make it unstable. If you go in and out of the modifier to apply other work to the
model (a quite intuitive action, as some modifier external work - such as moving vertexes
on the model - will affect your needs within the modifier), you might return to find all
your previous UV unwrap work gone. This means it is a very good idea to collapse the
Unwrap UVW modifier every time you're done making a change to it. However, this
creates a potential time sink, as the unwrap modifier preferences will have to be
repeatedly set, such as 1) setting the appropriate texture size and 2) choosing texture to
load. Though counter-intuitive, these preferences should be set in that chronological
order, and here's why. Applying texture resolution or any other Unwrap UVW preference
is in all versions of 3D Studio Max that I've come across been very, very time-consuming
if you do so after loading the texture you're about to modify (again, an intuitive thing to
do). Thus, make sure you set the texture resolution and all other unwrap modifier
preferences, before loading up the UV texture. Setting unwrap preferences before the
texture is loaded takes a fraction of the time it does to apply these settings after the fact.
Again, remember that 3D Studio Max does not remember Unwrap UVW's preferences
after the modifier has been collapsed. You should nonetheless collapse the modifier into
the stack every time you exit the modifier interface, or you will eventually make that
change that annuls those difficult-to-reproduce modifications you've made in the
Unwrap UVW modifier. Set the size first, then load the texture.
Refreshing updated UV textures. UV artists will often be modifying the UV texture in a 2D
tool alongside working in the UV unwrap modifier. The changes made in the 2D tool will
then be desired visible in the 3D tool. The quickest way to refresh textures visible in 3D
Studio Max's viewport is to toggle off and on the material editor (the 'M' key is the
default shortcut for this). If the texture still isn't updating, increment the texture's
filename and load it into the corresponding material. Note that the Unwrap UVW
modifier's texture display does not get updated simultaneously with the viewport. The
modifier will have to be collapsed and started anew to refresh the same texture name.
However, picking a texture name that has been incremented, and thus is a new name to
the modifier, works around the need for collapsing it.
Future potential - UV animation?
Someone out there have probably already mastered this, but I've only done
rudimentary tests so far. Animating the UV may emulate effects such as skin's movement
across ripping muscles. It is an unwieldy method, as UV movement are not mapped to the
3D tool's animation timeline, but some yet uncharted effects may be possible.
43
15)
Appendix 4 - Backup plan
Working with computers there is always a lot
of talk about the importance of saving your work,
and to back it up. In the workplace and as students
we're often told to keep this in mind at all times,
but rarely educated specifically on good methods
for achieving this. Described below are the backup
methods I have settled on. I apologize ahead of time
for using a fair amount of first person while
describing this chapter, but as it is a personal selfdeveloped technique I'm not sure how else I would
express it. It has been an integral part of how I've
managed to keep a creative project going over the
long term and so is included in the report.
15a) Incremental filenames
Working with incremental file names is a must to safeguard data and ensure there
are ways to backtrack if the current file ceases to function. Each file class require a slightly
different backup procedure.
i. Documents. For short documents I usually keep single files. On a document where
keeping previous iterations intact is important, generally speaking with long
documents and particularly with co-authored documents, a new editing session is
started by renaming the document to the current date. E.g. "project report - 201101-25".
ii. 2D files. Large 2D files such as textures and drawings can easily take long enough to
save that it may interrupt the creative flow of the work done. For this reason I do not
back up 2D files as often as 3D files. Roughly speaking, a temporary cyclical iteration
of files from about 00 through to 05 is applied, the file cycle being deleted once
permanent new version number has been arrived upon.
iii. 3D files. Most 3D programs I have experience with has some way that you can
inadvertently crash them or accidentally make the data in them become unstable. In
order to avoid losing valuable time, this calls for the stringent save routines detailed
below.
15b) The "save" shortcut
I make it a semi-conscious habit to press the program's shortcut key for saving. An
exception to this rule is if something potentially program-unstable is being attempted. In
these cases the shortcut key to save is hit first, then avoided until the risky procedure has
been completed. This is done to protect the last assumedly safe file. Once the unstable
procedure is complete, the save increment is increased numerically.
15c) When to save
Just about any changes followed by a break in muscular activity warrants a quick visit
to the save shortcut. Particularly so if working on an unstable process, or when many
changes are being made in a short space of time. If a row of changes are being made without
a natural break, stopping to save midstream is a good idea. I always save and then
44
immediately iterate whenever it feels like a part of the creation came out well, an obstacle
was overcome or it seems a great space of time passed since the previous iteration.
15d) Numerical extensions
The size of the numeric file name extension is set depending on the number of files
expected. I usually start with a "_00" extension and count upwards. If the numbers go into
three digits, renaming the original double-digit files to triple digits is a very good idea, to
keep file groups structured well within their folder. If the root name is changed of the workfile during the project (e.g. from creature_ to monster_) making the name change to all
previous iterations also helps keep the file system accessible and clean. Single digit extension
like monstermodel3, monstermodel7, etc. are avoided, since these aren't as easy to read
and pick out in a folder as properly identified incremental files. Adding an "_" (or
underscore) then double digits, makes the file group easy to separate from other folder files,
or file groups.
15e) Catching yourself
It is possible to get immersed in your work and forget to save for a while. Whenever
you catch yourself doing this, the recovery steps are threefold. First of all, fight the reflex to
simply save onto the current (and now relevantly old) file (e.g creature_151). Instead, save
the mid-process-I-just-caught-myself file to the next increment (e.g. creature _152) and then
continue working at the next increment after that (e.g. creature _153). This way you have:
a) kept the most likely safe file 151 and avoided applying any potentially unsafe data
added in the relative long space of time that has passed before you caught yourself.
b) saved a "stepping-stone-increment" in file 152 which represents a relative large
amount of work when compared to the average increment.
c) started on an all new adventure in increment 153, in which you are, within reason,
free to forget yourself in the creative process once again.
It might seem odd to iterate the file numeric twice once you catch yourself forgetting
to iterate, but it is the safest way to keep all your work. Omitting the second iteration when
you catch yourself (file 153), runs the risk of creating a collision between the many changes
from 151 to 152 and the many changes that might arise from forgetting yourself
consecutively, or twice in a row. Thus creating a large gap in the iteration of work saved.
This meticulous iteration method is most useful while working with unstable
software, or when in a creative fork-in-the-road where experimenting with the different
possible paths might eventually necessitate stepping back an iteration or two. Worst case
scenario is that you at one stage were happy with where your creation was going, then
overworked away from it and thus lost the opportunity to revert to where it was good.
Valuable time and momentum may be saved using this method.
15f) Naming milestone and experiment extensions
Since file iterations can reach into the 100's, it is helpful to make special names for
milestone or experimental files. A second extension behind the numerical one is then added,
signifying what the significance is. E.g. "creature_090_sculpting-complete".
This makes it easier to review the file group in retrospect and helps in selecting what
numbers to keep once the file's current version is finished. Once it is time to back up the
iterated data, my preference is to keep every tenth file, and/or any such named files.
Keeping entire sets of file iterations that reach three digits is avoided since the file group
45
then becomes unwieldy in the file browser (e.g. window explorer) and are likely to cause the
backup library to swell. Note that it can be of interest to keep the first few files of any 3D
iteration set intact, since these files often show a clear visual evolution of the new object.
Typically, files one through ten fit this description, varying according to the author's savehabits.
15g) The double reverse backup plan
I regularly backed up my project using a "double reverse backup". This means taking
the workspace on the PC's internal hard disk, backing it up once onto an external hard disk,
and then copying the backed up data back to the internal hard disk, into an incrementally
dated folder system. The folders in this system are created to be read sequentially if listed
alphabetically and so dates are typed in the order that computer lists numbers (0 first, then
1, then 2, etc.). For example, the folder containing the data for the-day-before-new-year'seve-of-last-year would read "backup 2010-12-31", rather than "backup, 31/12-2010" as
might be the proper hand-written form for such a date. This is to make the backup folder
more easily accessible and avoid computer-illegal file name characters, such as "/" (and,
notably, "?"). Following are some good reasons for having an external hard disk holding the
most current backup:
i. Double hardware failsafe. Sometimes hard disks cease to function, and the data on
them might at worst be unrecoverable, or expensive to extract at best. With two
hardware-separate copies of recent data, both internal and external hard disks would
have to break at the same time for data loss to be complete.
ii. Mobility. An external hard disk allows the backed up data to be transported without
the necessity of bringing the entire computer along. Bringing the external disk while
travelling away from the computer workspace, can for instance safeguard data from
rig theft.
iii. Fastest external backup method. Two separate hard disks means easy disk-to-disk file
transfer, and large storage capacity, eliminating multi- CD/DVD backups, limited sized
stick-disk backups or other cumbersome methods.
15h) Trickling data
At certain times, data that has been moved out of the current workspace (for size,
age or tidiness) and into the backup library, might need editing. You could have folders full
of holiday pictures, long music playlists or, as is the case for this project, large texture
libraries, that you'd rather have backed up than sitting in the current workspace. Once this
data require editing, the modifications should be done on the primary backup platform,
namely the external hard disk. This way entire workspace backups don't have to be made for
the sake of making minor adjustments to large sets of data. On the next backup iteration,
the changes made are catalogued as usual. This also solidifies the internal backup library as a
non-write zone, meaning the user doesn't have to concern him or herself about improving
any of the data there (bar the deletion of eventually redundant data or swelling data sizes).
Data improvements to backups are done only on the primary backup platform - the external
hard disk. This means one should have a structured folder system that doesn't exist in the
workspace, but is unique to the backup space. These folders is where the large data set
changes are trickled into.
46
15i) When to back up
Using the above system I backup about once every other month, depending on the
amount of data activity. For highly important files that might need day-to-day backup, I use
stick disks/flash-drives. For important sets of data that create the need for external backup
outside of the regular monthly schedule, I create a temporary "data dump" folder, which is
deleted upon the next complete workspace backup.
47
16)
Appendix 5 - References
The Audacity Team (2000) Audacity. http://www.freesoftwaredl.com/audacity-free-musiceditor?ref=59279 [Accessed 8 February 2011]
Bauer, J. (1915) Titta på dem, sade trollmor [Online image]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Bauer_1915.jpg [Accessed 7 February 2011]
Bauer, J. (1913) Tuvstarr [Online image]
http://www.hellefors.se/kommun/cloudberry/CloudberryImages/JohnBauer.jpg [Accessed 7
February - 2011]
Bauer, J. (1913) One summer's evening [Online image]
http://www.zazzle.co.uk/john_bauer_one_summers_evening_poster-228821415887717020
[Accessed 7 February - 2011]
Bauer, J. (1913) One summer's evening (alternate version) [Online image]
http://i102.photobucket.com/albums/m97/Caracal_photo/Blandat/John_Bauer6.jpg
[Accessed 7 February - 2011]
bodybuilder picture: body_builder_21sfw.gif [Texture base rhinotaur skin]
http://www.gymjox.com/images/bodybuilders/body_builder_21sf
w.gif [Accessed 3 May 2011]
NB! I was unable to re-locate the
picture of the body builder's back,
but I think this is the athlete in
question, applied for the
underlying texture base seen in
chapter 7.
Carmack, A., Cloud, K. (1993) Demon.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_LP_YP0I7zZY/Sp_TV6bYIII/AAAAAAAADI4/qPDYh2G8IYA/s400/ne
w_classic_doom_enem_pinky.gif [Accessed 7 February - 2011]
Carmack, A., Cloud, K., Punchatz, G. (1994) Archvile.
http://arrakis-ttm.com/doom/archvile.gif [Accessed 7 February - 2011]
cgtextures.com alligator picture: Reptiles0052 (2008) Textures/Animals/Reptiles/Other
Reptiles (page 1) [Texture base - rhinotaur skin]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/animals/reptiles/otherreptiles/Reptiles00
52_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed October 2008]
cgtextures.com elephant picture: Elephant0001 (2008) Textures/Animals/Elephant/Closeups
(page 2) [Texture base - rhinotaur skin]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/animals/elephant/closeups/Elephant0001
_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed October 2008]
cgtextures.com frog picture: Reptiles0003 (2008) Textures/Animals/Reptiles/Other Reptiles
(page 1) [Texture base - rhinotaur skin]
48
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/animals/reptiles/otherreptiles/Reptiles00
03_1_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed October 2008]
cgtextures.com ivory picture: Reliefs0068 (2008) Textures/Ornaments/Reliefs (page 1)
[Texture base - rhinotaur skin]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/ornaments/Reliefs/Reliefs0068_1_thumbl
arge.jpg [Accessed October 2008]
cgtextures.com elephant picture: Elephant0001 (2008) Textures/Animals/Elephant/Closeups
(page 2) [Texture base - rhinotaur skin]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/animals/elephant/closeups/Elephant0001
_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed October 2008]
cgtextures.com frog picture: Reptiles0003 (2008) Textures/Animals/Reptiles/Other Reptiles
(page 1) [Texture base - rhinotaur skin]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/animals/reptiles/otherreptiles/Reptiles00
03_1_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed October 2008]
cgtextures.com rhinoceros picture: Rhino0055 (2008) Textures/Animals/Rhinoceros/Full
Body [Texture base - rhinotaur skin]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/animals/rhinoceros/head/Rhino0055_thu
mblarge.jpg [Accessed October 2008]
cgtextures.com rhinoceros picture: Rhino0038 (2008) Textures/Animals/Rhinoceros/Full
Body [Texture base - rhinotaur skin]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/animals/rhinoceros/fullBody/Rhino0038_t
humblarge.jpg [Accessed October 2008]
cgtextures.com rhinoceros picture: Rhino0017 (2008)
Textures/Animals/Rhinoceros/Closeups [Texture base - rhinotaur skin]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/animals/rhinoceros/closeups/Rhino0017_
thumblarge.jpg [Accessed October 2008]
cgtextures.com rhinoceros picture: Rhino0050 (2008)
Textures/Animals/Rhinoceros/Closeups [Texture base - rhinotaur skin]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/animals/rhinoceros/head/Rhino0050_thu
mblarge.jpg [Accessed October 2008]
cgtextures.com reptile picture: Reptiles0009 (2008) Textures/Animals/Reptiles/Other
Reptiles (page 1) [Texture base - rhinotaur skin]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/animals/reptiles/otherreptiles/Reptiles00
09_1_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed October 2008]
cgtextures.com reptile picture: Reptiles0007 (2008) Textures/Animals/Reptiles/Other
Reptiles (page 1) [Texture base - rhinotaur skin
49
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/animals/reptiles/otherreptiles/Reptiles00
07_1_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed October 2008]
cgtextures.com leaf photo: LeavesTropical0034 (2008) Textures/Nature/Tropical/Tropical
Leaves (page 2) [Texture base - dryad limbleaf]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/nature/Tropical/TropicalLeaves/LeavesTro
pical0034_1_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed September 2008]
cgtextures.com leaf photo: LeavesTropical0037 (2008) Textures/Nature/Tropical/Tropical
Leaves (page 4) [Texture base - dryad limbleaf]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/nature/Tropical/TropicalLeaves/LeavesTro
pical0037_1_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed September 2008]
cgtextures.com leaf photo: LeavesTropical0079 (2008) Textures/Nature/Tropical/Tropical
Leaves (page 1) [Texture base- dryad apparel test, pants]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/nature/Tropical/TropicalLeaves/LeavesTro
pical0079_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed September 2008]
cgtextures.com leaf photo: LeavesTropical0178 (2010) Textures/Nature/Tropical/Tropical
Leaves (page 6) [Texture base - dryad apparel test, bra]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/nature/Tropical/TropicalLeaves/LeavesTro
pical0178_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed March 2010]
cgtextures.com leaf photo: TropicalFoliage0020 (2008) Textures/Nature/Tropical/Tropical
Foliage (page 1) [Texture base - dryad hair]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/nature/Tropical/TropicalFoliage/TropicalF
oliage0020_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed September 2008]
cgtextures.com concrete texture: ConcreteBare0312
(2010) Textures/Concrete/Bare (page 1) [Texture
base - cell bricks]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/con
crete/bare/ConcreteBare0312_thumblarge.jpg
[Accessed March 2010]
NB! ConcreteBare0312, used for the cell set's
bricks, is perhaps the only texture in the project
that's been downloaded and applied after
cgtextures.com stopped being an unconditional
service. I am unaware of the exact date of CG
Textures' policy change, so I cannot be 100% sure
of this fact. I think the policy change happened in
2009.
cgtextures.com wood texture: WoodFine0017 (2008) Textures/Wood/Fine Wood (page 1)
[Texture base - dryad skin]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/wood/FineWood/WoodFine0017_thumbl
arge.jpg [Accessed 6 October 2008]
cgtextures.com wood texture: WoodPlanksClean0040 (2008) Textures/Wood/Planks/Clean
(page 1) [Texture base - prison cell]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/wood/Planks/Clean/WoodPlanksClean004
0_1_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed 4 Mars 2010]
50
cgtextures.com metal texture: MetalRivets0002 (2008) Textures/Metal/SeamsnBolts/Rivets
(page 2) [Texture base - prison cell]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/metal/SeamsnBolts/Rivets/MetalRivets00
02_thumblarge.jpg [Accessed September 2008]
cgtextures.com moon picture: Various0430 (2010) Textures/Various (page 7) [Texture base night sky]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/Various/Various0430_thumblarge.jpg
[Accessed May 2010]
cgtextures.com rock texture: RockSmooth0030 (2008) Textures/Rock/smooth (page 1)
[Texture base - prison cell]
http://www.cgtextures.com/thumbnails/textures/Rock/smooth/RockSmooth0030_thumblar
ge.jpg [Accessed September 2008]
doctorspiller.com diseased tongue picture: Fissured_tongue (2008) [Texture base - rhinotaur
skin] http://www.doctorspiller.com/images/OralAnatomy/Fissured_tongue.jpg [Accessed
October 2008]
The Freesound Project. (2005) The Freesound Project. http://www.freesound.org/ [Accessed
8 February 2011]
Fusdahl, A. E. (2011) CG Affinity http://www.cgaffinity.com/ [Accessed 8 February 2011]
Hitchcock, A. (1935) MacGuffin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin
[Accessed 9 February 2011]
Jackson, S., Nicholson, R. (1983) Citadel of Chaos. London: Puffin Books, pp. 118.
Johansen, B. (2011) Grafikk & 3D http://www.bjornarj.com/ [Accessed 8 February 2011]
Kvernmo, K. E. (2011) Fiona Fjong. http://www.fionafjong.com/ [Accessed 8 February 2011]
Kvernmo, S. A. (2011) Monster Cute. http://www.monstercute.com/ [Accessed 1 February
2011]
Lee, S., Romita Sr., J, et al. (1966) Rhino; Spiderman Fiercest Foes Hasbro action figure
[Online image] http://myfigurecollection.net/image/600/Scarecroodle1277952923.jpeg
[Accessed 7 February - 2011]
Lee, S., Kirby, J., et al. (1961) The Thing, MARVEL Polystone Collectibles [Online image]
http://www.maxactionfigure.com/41nmdvZZBML._SL500_.jpg-img-amazon.comthe_action_figture_MARVEL_Polystone_Collectibles%3A_The_Thing__Fantastic_Four__Pre
mium_Format_Figure_b [Accessed 7 February - 2011]
Safety Last (1923) Directed by Newmeyer, F., Taylor, S. [Film]. USA. Hal Roach Studios.
51
Shadow of the Colossus (Playstation 2) (2005) Designed by Ueda, F. [Video Game]. Sony
Computer Entertainment.
Sounddogs (1996) Sounddogs. http://www.sounddogs.com/ [Accessed 3 May 2011]
Unknown artist(s), Namco Ltd (1995) Lei Wulong.
http://www.tekkenpedia.com/w/images/2/2f/Lei_Wulong_-_CG_Art_Image__Tekken_6_Bloodline_Rebellion.png [Accessed 7 February -2011]
wikimedia.org horse palatum picture (2008) [Texture base - rhinotaur skin]
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/76/Palatum_horse.JPG/277pxPalatum_horse.JPG [Accessed 7 October 2008]
3D mouse picture: art136revspacenav450.jpg (2011)
http://www.computerarts.co.uk/__data/assets/image/805995/art136revspacenav450.jpg
[Accessed 3 May 2011]
52
17)
Appendix 6 - Bibliography
Aladdin (1992) Directed by Clements, R., Musker, J. [Film]. New York, USA: Walt Disney
Pictures.
Bauer, J. (2004) Swedish Folktales. Edinburgh: Floris Books.
Bringsværd, T. Å. (1983) Ker Shus. Oslo: Gyldendal.
Burning Safari (2006) Directed by Aupetit, V., et al. [Film]. France: Gobelins.
The Chaos Engine (1993) (Amiga) Designed by Knight, S., Matthews, E. [Video Game]. Bitmap
Brothers, Renegade Software.
Comaneci, N. (1976) Nadia Comaneci-first perfect ten in history (1976 Montreal)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m2YT-PIkEc [Accessed 7 February 2011]
Disney, W., Barks, C., et al. (1934) Donald Duck. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck
[Accessed 7 February 2011].
Doom II: Hell on Earth (PC) (1994) Designed by Green, S., et al. [Video Game]. id Software, GT
Interactive.
Dragon's Lair (arcade) (1983), Designed by Bluth, D., Dyer, R. [Video Game]. Advanced Micro
Computers, Bluth Group Ltd.
Dumas, A., Maquet, A. (1844) The Count of Monte
Cristo. France: Chapman and Hall.
God of War (Playstation 2) (2005) Designed by Jaffe,
D. [Video Game]. Sony Computer Entertainment.
NB! I first came across The Count of Monte Cristo
as a 1950's Norwegian comic book, but I've been
unable to piece together a complete reference for
the publication of this issue. The story was rereleased in 2007, as part of Illustrerte Klassikere 7.
Harold Lloyd The Definitive Collection (2007) Directed by Newmeyer, F. C., et al. [DVD] UK:
Optimum Releasing.
Howard, R. E. (1932) Conan the Barbarian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian [Accessed 7 February 2011]
In the Master's Shadow - Hitchcock's Legacy (2008) Directed by Leva, G., [Documentary].
USA: Universal.
Inception (2010) Directed by Nolan, C. [Film]. London, United Kingdom: Warner Bros.
Pictures.
Jackson, S. Livingstone, I. (1982) Warlock of Firetop Mountain. London: Puffin Books.
Kafka, J. (2005) Kafkas Beste. Gjøvik: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag AS.
53
Karateka (Commodore 64) (1986), Designed by Jordan Mechner [Video Game]. Jordan
Mechner, Brøderbund.
King, S. (1987) Eyes of the Dragon. USA: Viking.
Kung Fu Panda (2008) Directed by Osborne, M., Stevenson, J. [Film]. Cannes, France:
Dreamworks Animation.
Lee, S., Ditko, S. (1962) Spider-Man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man [Accessed 7
February 2011]
Lee, S., Kirby, J. (1961) Fantastic Four. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Four [Accessed
7 February 2011]
Lee, S., Kirby, J. (1961) The Thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_%28comics%29
[Accessed 7 February 2011]
Lee, S., Kirby, J. (1962) Hulk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulk_%28comics%29 [Accessed 7
February 2011]
Lee, S., Kirby, J. (1963) X-Men. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men [Accessed 7 February
2011]
Lee, S., Romita Sr., J (1966) Rhino. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_%28comics%29
[Accessed 7 February 2011]
Lifeboat (1944) Directed by Hitchcock, A. [Film]. New York, USA. Twentieth Century Fox Film
Corporation.
Lindgren, A. (1973) The Brothers Lionheart. Sweden: Rabén & Sjögren.
Massive Attack (2010) Heligoland [CD]. United Kingdom: Virgin.
Muybridge, E. (1957) Animals in Motion. London: Constable and Company.
Oldboy (2003) Directed by Park, C. [Film]. South Korea: Egg Films.
Papillon (1973) Directed by Schaffner, F. J. [Film]. USA: Allied Artists.
Phone Booth (2003) Directed by Schumacher, J. [Film]. Toronto, Canada: Fox 2000 Pictures.
Pinocchio (1940) Directed by Ferguson, N., et al. [Film]. New York, USA: Walt Disney Pictures.
Piranesi, G.B. (1973) The Prisons (Le Carcieri). New York: Dover Publications.
Pulp Fiction (1994) Directed by Tarantino, Q. [Film]. Cannes, France: Miramax Films.
Prince of Persia (Amiga) (1990), Designed by Jordan Mechner [Video Game]. Brøderbund.
54
Rango (2011) Directed by Verbinski, G. [Film]. Westwood, USA: Nickelodeon Movies.
Robin Hood (1973) Directed by Reitherman, W. [Film]. New York, USA: Walt Disney Pictures.
Roger, M. (2001) Modeling Joan of Arc by Michel Roger
http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/max/joanofarc/joanmenu.php [Accessed 8 February
2011]
Shawshank Redemption (1994) Directed by Darabont, F. [Film]. Toronto, Canada: Castle Rock
Entertainment.
Starostin, Peter (2007) Max practice rig with facials 1.0.0
http://www.creativecrash.com/3dsmax/downloads/character-rigs/c/max-practice-rig-withfacials [Accessed 8 February 2011]
Streetfighter (arcade) (1987) Designed by Matsumoto, H., et al. [Video Game]. Capcom.
Tekken 2 (arcade) (1995) Designed by unknown designer(s). [Video Game]. Namco.
Tekken 3 (arcade) (1997) Designed by Harada, K., et al. [Video Game]. Namco.
The Sacred Armour of Antiriad (Commodore 64) (1986) Designed by Malone, D. [Video
Game]. Palace Software.
Thomas, F., Johnston, O. (1981) Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. USA: Hyperion.
Tom and Jerry (1940) Directed by Barbera, J., Hanna, W. [Series] Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Tobal no.1 (Playtstation) (1996), Designed by Ishii, S. [Video Game]. Square.
Tolkien, J.R.R. (1937) The Hobbit. UK: George Allen & Unwin.
Toy Story (1995) Directed by Lasseter, J. [Film]. Hollywood, USA: Pixar Animation Studios,
Walt Disney Pictures.
Twain, M. (1881) The Prince and the Pauper. Canada: James R. Osgood & Co.
Up (2009) Directed by Docter, P., Peterson, B. [Film]. Cannes, France: Pixar Animation
Studios, Walt Disney Pictures.
Virtua Fighter (arcade) (1993), Designed by Ishii, S. [Video Game]. Sega.
WALL·E (2008) Directed by Stanton, A. [Film]. Los Angeles, USA: Pixar Animation Studios,
Walt Disney Pictures.
Williams, Robert (2001) Animator's Survival Kit. London: Faber and Faber Limited.
55