shot 2 texture test

shot 2 RGB

Bird of the third dimension

This is a render of the bird character that will appear as if portrayed in normal space, not affected by the abstract perspective.

Thesis Animatic _ 02

Animation Test

To reiterate the importance of cognitive science to this thesis, I would like to highlight again on the visual abstraction and how I intend to use it to direct attention.

below is an example





I've found what’s happing on screen is creating a striking disconnect between the flat elements in the ‘background’ and the moving elements. Hopefully this will produce interesting eye tracking information.

Texture Pipeline

Textures in the 3D space will be broken up into 3 distinct materials. Initially, these materials are represented by three separate colors: red, green, and blue. Each material will include a layer of painted detail in addition to the solid colors. These details will maintain their spacial relationship to the shapes they are applied to. The solid colors will eventually be removed and replaced with flat patterns and textures that will appear to be behind each object. To help distinguish objects from one another, the darkness and lightness that naturally occurs on each facet of a 3D object with a light source will be maintained.

Nuke pipeline:::
My first attempt at swapping out colors involved using a chroma key to pull out a specific range of color from images rendered out of Maya. This process was not as accurate as I needed it to be, and the result varied from image to image. I needed a pipeline that would work in all cases.

Next I tried limiting myself to three colors, RGB, and moving image channels around, which turned out to be faster, cleaner, and worked well enough for multiple cases. The unfortunate downside is that each image sequence out of Maya would be limited by these three colors only, and I would be forced to render out multiple passes from maya to give myself the texture diversity I want in the final comp. For example, the main character requires three colors alone, and does not share any textures with objects in the environment. He would be one pass out of Maya, each boxcar type would be another pass, the ground and railroad tracks might be another, etc.

Here is an example of this effect currently used today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWtecq1hRDw&feature=related

Story Change

I changed the story for a few reasons. One of which was because I felt
as though the abstracted visuals I plan on taking advantage of are
better suited for a storyline that takes place in a fictional world.

Swapping between the abstract view and the normal perspective view is
no longer a factor in this animation. One focus of this thesis is
placing an importance on the bond between visual abstraction and
storytelling. The 'look' of this final piece should not be treated as
a replaceable component. Instead, the story is relying on particular
elements to be depicted in certain ways. With this in mind, I felt
that having part of the story depicted in a more traditional manner
did not add anything substantial to either the story in its entirety,
nor to this thesis. When viewed as a whole, the concept for the
original story also seemed to emphasize a positive bias towards the
normal space perspective, such that it acted as the 'reward' for the
main character. While indeed, elements are to be composed abstractly
for the audience's benefit, I decided it would be better if characters
in the story remained unaware of the visual abstraction.