Animation is complete

Hey, I'm back 5 days later. The animation is complete, but I also have bad news. I got lazy in documenting things .-.

This is by far the largest amount of progress done and yet I barely documented my whole process with pictures. So I'll try my best to explain what unfolded these past 5 days.

Progress

I'll start with where we left off, finishing Chat Noir's Rig. With a bit more fiddling, I finally managed to properly rig Chat Noir's face and other features. I still have work to do (fixing the eyes and hair dynamics, I'll talk more about this later), but for right now, the rig is fully functional. 

Now about Ladybug, I already have a functioning rig for Ladybug, but there were things I wasn't happy about and things I wanted to improve on. As much as I actually liked the already made rig, there were major downsides, I couldn't look past which would hinder what I wanted to do. The rig I used didn't have eye movement at all which led me to do weird workarounds, things that shouldn't need to be done just to have a functioning eye. This is fine for static shots where the character isn't animated, but not ideal in anyway. Two, the model itself is very low resolution due to the fact that it was ripped from a mobile game. If I wasn't trying to actively animate these models, this rig would have been fantastic, thank you to whoever uploaded this rig and model completely for free!

Enough of the reasons why, I chose to pick up the same model from the game rise of the sphinx and began my work from there.

I won't go into more details about rigging since it was pretty straight forward since I've already done the same with Chat Noir. Important note about the facial rigging, make sure to actually bind the facial rig to the body rig and make sure to bind the controllers as well. Next, I tackled the hair using the same methods as Chat Noir. This time was a bit more challenging since it dealt with longer hair as well as twin tails, but in the end, I think it came out OK. Not good for any closeups, but good enough, without me spending even more time creating a custom model for just the hair.

 

Trying to first block out her bangs and the hair bit that hangs out from the side.

Twin tails added, the shape isn't quite there yet. The hair looks too flat.

Final state of the hair after fixing the poofyness of the hair a bit.

Finished Hair model on the finished model with all of the facial controllers

With the Ladybug rig finished, I had to next make a big decision. Finish my current animation with the outdated Ladybug rig or start from scratch and throw away HOURS of work.

I chose to start over. Of course, I didn't want to waste all of my efforts for nothing. So I've uploaded the uncomplete render to YouTube, might as well. Keep in mind, I never finished it, so the animations itself are pretty rough and obviously, the whole scene is not done, so lighting is also flat. This is technically the first animation I ever did, its pretty laughable now literally a week later, but I'm still proud of how it turned out, well turned out as in not yet done. 

https://youtu.be/2OKCpLKahuw?si=ca4STvMTMysMnTQj

^^^^^

The Animation

Starting over, I wanted to do the same story and concept as the other animation. Of course, the difference in my thinking two weeks ago versus now is massive since I've watched and absorbed as much information I could about lighting, scene composition, camera work, animation, and blender modeling. So I sat down and made a new sort of story to follow with it.

It was pretty simple and short at first. Ladybug is standing and staring at an Adrien billboard lovestruck while Chat Noir wanted to show off his camera. That was the general idea, but then I got really carried away with how the story unfolded. 

Big ramble [She was going to swat away his hand first for attention, Chat Noir would zoom into the billboard, the two of them would have a dialogue with Chat Noir asking if Adrien is her crush and then Chat Noir would swing the camera back at Ladybug with her confessing she had a thing for Adrien, she notices she had been caught on camera confessing and threatens chat noir, chat noir runs away saying Adrien is free tomorrow in the evening.]

It won't be until 3 days later and half of the animations done did I realize, the story no longer fit with my animation and would instead be too drawn out and kind of absurd. Absurd as in completely out of character and also the story is way too dragged out. I tried to finish the animation following the story but evidently it wasn't going to happen. So I scrapped half of the whole story and recombined my animation with what I could.

It was around this point when I began to animate did I stop really documenting my process with pictures, so I'll go ahead and breakdown what I have finished so far. 

Reference photos for the lighting of the scene.

The moment when I finished animating and realized that I didn't take any pictures of the whole process.

The finished set. This set would be revised with lower poly models to optimize render times as well as completely different lighting.

A single frame of the finished animation. I made a lot of changes to the lighting after this since it just "didn't feel right". A night scene on top of the rooftop with a camera would never look like this. It looks nice though.

The next photos are going to show off what I did to the lighting... At the time anyways, I made a lot of changes to how everything looked.

This is the set lighting, how Ladybug is lit up.

How I setup the fake "indirect" lighting you would get from actual light bouncing everywhere. This is me trying to match the reference pictures.

The scene lighting coming from the street lamps itself. It looks nothing like the references without the indirect lighting.

An update on how I lit everything, starting to look more like the reference.

Used false color to begin to understand what went wrong with the lighting. Dark blue is under exposure and it goes to Dark red for over exposure. I'm taking a more realistic approach to lighting so understanding how the scene is exposed to the camera is very important.

A world of difference. There are more details and Ladybug has more details. Less Exposure value = more details but darker. More exposure value = less details but brighter

More correct lighting. The best to my abilities anyways. The background behind Ladybug doesn't look right, but I really did try my best, so this is where I stopped at. I put the older picture on top so you can compare the difference in lighting. The first one looked flat, emotionless. While the second one, is warm and much more alive. All I did was adjust the exposure as well as tweak how the lighting hit Ladybug and its strength.

The latest render, it looks off due to me removing the exposure node from the compositor. I'll properly color grade the footage in Davinci resolve.

On render time, with my original assets, they rendered at around 3 minutes a frame. With the animation around 460 frames total, this would easily take 23 hours to render. I'm not rendering that. After messing around a bit, i found out that the majority of the rendering process was due to the way too high resolution assets in the scene. Going the free route, I spent a whole hour combing through sketchfab for free assets to replace them. Upon replacing the cars and street lamps, the time to render dropped drastically to just 30 seconds a frame. Shaving off around 18ish hours off the rendering time. 

About the animation itself, I'm learning how to animate and absorbing as much knowledge as I can. Its improving, there's life to the animation now, but there is still one aspect I'm still horrible at. Facial animating. HOLY HELL. Uncanny Valley to the max! I want to do more with facial animating and learn more about it in the future. I'm sort of cheating with motion capture, but even then its still pretty bad. I would do way more than I did on this project, but the facial rig just wasn't cooperating since I didn't properly fix it.

Future

It's time for post processing, compositing everything as well as maybe animating some subtitles in, and adding sounds and sound vfx. Anyways, there are things I need to touch up on after this project or some time this project. The rigs need fixing. Its manageable for now, but its really disappointing. I need to fix the eye geometry in Ladybug and Chat Noir's original blend file. The little highlight in Ladybugs eye took over an hour to figure out a fix for, her eyes looked dead without that effect. The other thing I need to look into is hair dynamics of the hair. It is for some reason failing to properly apply physics causing the hair to flail about everywhere. For now, I've turned off the hair physics, this is disappointing since the whole point was to make the hair move on its own. Another fix I need to implement, is to actually make sure the face rig stays on the model when the head or body moves. I wanted to do a selfie shot with Chat Noir, but I couldn't due to the face rig not properly being attached so that's why the future animation I'll upload is seemingly too short in the beginning. I was too far into the animation so I couldn't just upload a fixed chat noir model.

That's it for now. I'll continue learning more and more. My lighting skill is definitely higher than my animation skill that's for sure.