What was:
My last project is finished, and it was tons of fun.
For those interested in how it came to be, here's a little breakdown of the single parts.
After my last post I kept working on the shaders while planning to turn the whole thing into a small animation showcasing the instruments, after all, what good are instruments if you can't hear them played right? However, while I usually find pretty good royalty-free music to accompany my videos it was not really the case for this case, where the music itself plays a more major part as it's part of the focus. Most rock orientated free music sounded like the typical advertising or sports show openings. I vented my frustration with an old friend of mine. We used to play in a band together back in high-school, called the Rubber Piggy Band. He was basically the one getting me into music, I only picked up the bass to be able to play with him when we were around 14. (I recently also brought my old bass guitar with me to London to re-learn and start playing again). Ever since the old days he's been pretty heavily into music, played in a few great bands, learned an astonishing amount of instruments and writes his own songs. So, long story short, he announced that he'd write a song for me. By now he goes by the name of ChePawsky, and you can expect more great music from him, maybe even another collaboration with me. We certainly already have plans!
This obviously lifted the small animation to the next level, as I wanted to do his music justice and the whole project turned into a collaborative effort for a fitting song and music video. It was great fun to work on a group project as equal participant instead of working 'for' someone. And seeing both sides of the piece grow alongside was such an interesting experience.
While his musical input changed a few of my ideas for the shot - I originally had something a bit more punk-inspired in mind, as you might be able to see from the stickers on the guitars and the character design that was already mostly developed by the time we got in touch - we quickly found out that even after all those years our minds were working in sync. He dropped a few ideas of what he imagined the video might contain and they fit exactly with what I had in mind. It was amazing to watch this unfold.
Character Design
I am no character artist, but I obviously needed characters for this shot. The last comic artist I worked for (mentioned in my last post) already requested me to put characters in the shots I provided for him, the work with him was a lot more rough and production orientated, more like 3D sketches for him to work his magic on. Back then I came up with a fast workflow, using Adobe Fuse with some modification in Maya and posing directly in Unreal Engine. So I figured, why reinvent the wheel, when it worked last time. Again I adapted the models from Fuse, changing the textures and models to my liking and adding assets like the headphones. The animations were taken off of Mixamo and then customized in Maya and Unreal to fit the movement and hand placements for each shot, fitting them with the music. In the end in most shots there's not too much left of the original pre-composed animations.
Shaders
I had been working on two custom post-process shaders for this work, the first was a hatch shader for the shadows.
This was supposed to be combined with my own version of the often seen cartoon-cell shade effect. For my works on the latter I learned most from underscore's cell shader tutorial as well as unreal's own tutorial.
In the end I dropped the hatching shader I have been working on. It looked good on stillframes, but the way I worked it, having it based on screen-space AO, was just too busy for animation. I haven't given up on it, currently trying to transform it to real-time raytracing AO instead, which should provide a cleaner and more static result.
The toon shader however, was further developed and refined and probably ended up the most comples shader I've made so far.
All of this was combined with a simple master colour blent with all the materials to get a consistent colour scheme for the 'monochrome' scenes of yellow or pink backgrounds with blue characters, having only the instruments remain their original colour to have them pop out more.
Assets
The video is heavily focused on the instruments being played, so except for the starting sequence, I didn't need many assets except for the animated spiral in the background and a few extras, like the gigantic record player they're spinning on and of course the rubber ducky with it's short cameo.
What's to come:
I got a lot of projects in my mind, as always trying to balance them with a more demanding work since I've been promoted to Senior QA Tester at Square Enix, especially with the big new Endwalker Patch for FFXIV coming up.
Anyway, I recently treated myself to my very first VR goggles, the beautiful HP reverb, it is amazing how these have and will continue to heavily effect the way we view media. While it is incredibly stunning to sit in a real cockpit of a Tie-Fighter or stand in a different world through these, for me the experience of suddenly standing in the middle of my own creations is even more baffling, feeling like you're just about to be able to touch the very things I created on the computer. Therefore I've already started to dive into the creative use of these. It's an experimental approach, especially when trying to find the balance of freedom while still keeping the viewer from experiencing nausea from wrong or quick camera movement. Because I had so much fun on this last project, I've decided to use it as my playground for this and create a special VR-360 cut of the video. So stay tuned!
