Did someone say crowds?

OK, I was enjoying a pleasant walk in the Oboe district when suddenly out of nowhere this huge crowd of people appeared!

( Unfortunately Youtube's compression does't do the picture any justice )

So here are some stills with less compression:

If you study the picture more closely you may see characters intersecting each other (especially in the third example because I made it too dense), however most of the time it's completely unnoticeable due to the flat line art nature of the characters.

And no, I don't have a render farm up my sleeve. This is thousands of 3D characters in a scene rendered in a matter of minutes rather than hours.

So in the first example we have:

• just 1 mental ray rendered background (less than a minute)
• 200 frames of characters rendered in the viewport (another couple of minutes)
• 200 frames of shadow pass rendered in mental ray at half the resolution (20 to 25 minutes)

As you can see, it was only the shadow pass that took longer to render. However, for some shots you may get away without casting any shadows at all. And rendering shadows at half resolution seemed to work well, without loosing much quality.

At some point soon I will write up exactly how to do this.

Ethan Shilling

YPGTTO: The King & Queen Are In Residence!

YPGTTO / The King & Queen orthographs / Julien Van Wallendael

I'm pleased to announce the King and Queen of the Kingdom of Sound have taken up residence - courtesy of Ethan Shilling, who has translated Julien Van Wallendael's character designs into fully-rigged and ready-to-animate 3D models.

YPGTTO / The King / Design by Julien Van Wallendael / 3D model & rig by Ethan Shilling

YPGTTO / The Queen / Design by Julien Van Wallendael / 3D model & rig by Ethan Shilling

Character Design- Birds- Revisited

A short while ago I was tasked to create orthographies for bird number 6 ready for modelling.  It turned into more of a challenge than originally anticipated.

Below are the initial ortho's however I'd forgotten to show the bird with its wings outspread. This posed a challenge when accounting for toon line shaders on a set of functional wings that had to fold neatly back into place and somehow resemble the minimalist 2D design. 

After a discussion with Phil and Ethan about the technical aspects and what would work best we tried out a block colour bird option. But it was agreed the black lines were best kept and also the darker orange wing colours should be removed. 

A further discussion with Julien came to the conclusion the initial wing designs didn't look strong enough to carry our little bird and something more anatomically correct would be better. (Quite right, the initial designs look too leafy!) In the end wings similar to a Sparrow, Finch or Robin were agreed upon, leading us to the final ortho's below. The action plan is to juggle between two character models for the in-flight and grounded bird shots.

Animation : Red : Run Cycle

A couple of clips of an energetic Red running around

Character Design- Birds

A quick revisit of the birds from Julien's original early concepts. We've finalised with bird 6 ready for its appearance in the Percussion District.

Character Rigging - Yellow Update

I am soo close to finishing the Yellow rig, but I need to buy myself just a little bit more time. Hopefully this little teaser is enough to keep you going.

Poor Yellow - she's like putty in my hands!

( By the way, I can fix her face back to normal! don't worry! )

For those who are curious to know how it's put together:

• The main part of the head is controlled directly by a lattice.
• The hair and hair bows are pinned to the very same lattice, but not deformed directly by it.
• Each hair strand is controlled by it's own spline IK, which is pinned in three places, allowing it to conform to the shape of the head, whilst still allowing for secondary animation.
• Although not demonstrated in the video, the hair bows can also be deformed separately.
• The face rig is (or will be) identical to Reds face rig.

So what's left to do then?
Not much. Everything under the hood is working (as far as I can tell), however right now I'm in the middle of creating and connecting the final animatable controls. (In the video, I was just manipulating the joints directly)

Ethan Shilling

Character Design- The Horse

Helping with the load, I have taken Julien. V. W's original concepts of the horse notation character and helped finalise the designs into orthographies.

YPGTTO / Colour Design

The colours of the individual districts comprising the Kingdom Of Sound

The colours for the inhabitants of the Kingdom Of Sound

Characters: The King Expression Sheet

YPGTTO / The King Expression sheet / Julien Van Wallendael

YPGTTO: Character Model Progress - The King and Queen

Just another quick update.

I have started to work on the King and Queen character models. It's still in the early stages, but you get a sense for how they will look as 3D characters.

The King and Queen

What I want to do is bring the King and Queen to the same level of progress as Yellow before getting into the nitty gritty bits of rigging.

In order to do that I still need to:

• tidy up these models
• create the flat shaded look
• place the joints and controls

Ethan Shilling

YPGTTO: Yellow Character Update

Just another little update on Yellow.

The model is more or less finished. (although there's just a few minor things left that I want to tweak)

I have also begun to rig Yellow. I have built the skeleton and created most of the control shapes. (Many of which have been borrowed from the Red Rig)

The controls have been re-positioned and organised into the correct hierarchy and all the custom control attributes have been added.

That's about all there is to show right now.

So this is what's left to do (but in no particular order):

• skinning
• building the spine rig
• building the arms
• build the legs / feet
• building the face rig
• figuring out what to do with the hair
• plus controls for anything else unique to Yellow

Many of the above tasks are going to be fairly straight forward because they're identical to the Red Rig.

Then once those are done, everything needs to be connected to the final control rig and tested.

Ethan Shilling

Modelling: The Conductor

The Conductor statue / Model by Alan Postings / Design by Emily Clarkson

So much of what we're trying to achieve with YPGTTO relies on translating the innate charms of our production art into as charming 3D assets... The image above is actually the 3D model version of Emily's 29b iteration below - as modelled by Alan.  It's always rather thrilling seeing these elements of our Kingdom of Sound arriving as 'real' things...

The Conductor  / Emily Clarkson

YPGTTO Character Modelling: Yellow Progress

Today I am showing my progress on Yellow.

I'd like to say that I've modelled and fully rigged Yellow, but things got complicated with the modelling process... or rather, I probably made things more complicated than they needed to be.

So this is where I'm at right now.

Here is a picture of Yellow in its current form (& Red for size comparison).

There are still some things to finish off, such as:

• feet need to be outlined instead of solid 
• body needs to be filled yellow 
• the face is missing the outlines / nose & extra bits of hair on top 

Unfortunately, the hair has been a big stumbling block.

I have tried many things in order to get the hair to work well in 3D, but it has taken a lot of experimenting, all of which lead me to one conclusion.

I can't draw the perfect 3D spiral to look good from all angles... it's just a physical impossibility. Therefore, when animating the hair, it is going to be necessary to orient the spiral to face the camera so it always looks correct (like in the drawings).

This picture shows what I mean:

It may not be ideal from my point of view, but giving animators more control can't ever be a bad thing. I also need to accept that it's never going to look exactly like the original drawing.

When I have some more time, it would be good to explain all the experiments in more detail, but to keep this post from getting too long, here are a selection of images showing some of the things I have tried (from drawing curves manually, to drawing mathematically with code, to sculpting fully 3D meshes - you name it, I've probably tried it!).

I had hoped to be further than where I currently am, but sometimes it's necessary to spend a bit of time trying different things, even if it means discarding it at the end because it wasn't right.

Thankfully the note shaped body was more straight forward and 'just works' from virtually all angles (this is a refinement of the model I showed in my last post).

That's all for now.

Ethan Shilling

YPGTTO: Character / Red & Yellow

Here's just a quick update to say that Red is fully rigged.

So assuming that we don't find any random glitches or instabilities during the animation process, there is nothing left to do on Red.

I haven't had time to record another video covering the latest additions (although there's not much else to it really), but I hope to get that done fairly soon.

Now my attention shifts to Yellow.

Yellow is similar to Red, but there are still some things that need to be figured out with the model. For example, the body is completely different.

This is a rough draft of how the body is going to be recreated in 3D.

And this is what the complete note shape looks like from looking upwards, mid and downwards.

The hair is also tricky to deal with. My original attempts were simply to create some free floating curves representing hair strands. However, I'm now thinking that I may need to change that for a solid head / hair mesh with strokes overlaid.

Maybe something like this:

I know I'm getting closer to the right look, but I'm not quite there yet. That's the tricky bit - making it look correct from multiple angles.

Once I've got the model figured out, I will then be able to figure out how much of the Red Rig I can repurpose for Yellow.

That's all for now.

Ethan Shilling

YPGTTO: Yellow Expressions Sheets

As promised :)

YPGTTO: Red Expression Sheet

Sorry for taking so long but here's Red (Yellow coming right up!) I decided to leave the body as it was because adding onto to it, in my opinion, would make him look less iconic and visible from afar. Let me know if you think differently :)

YPGTTO: Bassoon Workers Colours

Potential inspiration for the lifts sequence

YPGTTO: Bassoon Characters

Always a bit of a struggle making those musical notations stand out but here's my take on the city workers.

[Some examples of 'updated' UPA environments by Pauline Merlaut.]

YPGTTO: Yellow Doodles #1

I don't feel like a lot of these turned out successful... wish there were more musical notations to pick from!

YPGTTO: Character Doodles Sheet

Spread out and numbered for convenience (I admit it was quite tedious to work out which one we were talking about in the previous layout, I'm very much sorry!)

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Just seen your latest page, Jordan; I think Red's character really come through in these and some of their expression made me really chuckle (in a good way). All around lovely :)