The Lost Turtles

Again, don't forget to turn the quality up, and let me know what you think.

Problems and Feedback

Some of the problems I experienced while creating this animation and how I went about solving them.

Because I created the character rigs while at university, on the 2013 version of 3ds max, when I got home and tried to edit them on my 2012 version, I got a missing file error; a they had obviously updated the rig technology between versions. Basically it refused to open the file. In order to solve this problem I installed the 2013 version, which fortunately is free to me as a student, however after installing 2013 and attempting to use it, I had more problems.

2012 files opened in 2013 would cause the frame rate to drop to around 0.02 fps and below, making the scene literally impossible to work in.

In the end I found that the problem was the nitrous graphics processing system in 3ds max in 2013 that apparently can have problems running on some PCs. To solve this problem I changed the graphics system to my PC's Graphic Processor Unit which solved the fps issue.

While attempting to render scenes quite late on in the animation, some of the rigs were showing in the render even though I had set all the bones to 'non-renderable' this one stumped me for a while,. After trying a variety of variations of making bones unrenderable without success, it turned out that some of the bones had become attached to the model itself; however these were duplicates of the bones in the actual rig, so deleting the attached bones did not affect the working rig.

When attempting to import the rigged characters into the scene files, either the rig would distort horribly, causing massive inflation of some model parts, like the feet while shrinking parts like the entire upper body. Or the model would import without the rig at all.

I never found the cause of this issue; however I did solve the problem by making duplicates of the rig file and importing the scenes into the rig, rather than the rig into the scenes.

During lip syncing I found that the speech I had intended for April to say was in fact said in the clip by Donatello. In order to solve this I imported the sound clip into Adobe Audition and edited the tone and pitch, to make it sound as female as possible without speeding it up or distorting it.

I showed the final render to some friends and family and asked for their thoughts and any feedback for improvements I could make.

Some of the most frequent feedback I got, and how I addressed it:

·         Too much time at the start spent just looking at the sky, gets boring

- Cut some of the sky from the start of the video to speed up the time it takes to get to the titles

·         Not enough time spent on the titles or the newspaper clippings, too quick to read

- Slowed the speed of the clip so that each clip spent more time on screen to be read, only had to sacrifice black spaces between fading in and out so that wasn't a problem and didn't require me to lengthen the animation.

·         Some of the sounds were a bit choppy, it was very obvious where id taken clips from the show

- I added an overall ambiance track to the whole film o help blend the clips in to the sound of the rest of the video

- I also added more and longer fade ins and outs of the audio clips.

Four Rendered Images of my Animation

Set Design and Environmental Animation

Below is the setup of the opening scene. I used a lot of space in between the objects to create a sense of distance and emptiness in the world.

Above is a screenshot of me attempting to figure out how to make the newspaper clipping flap in a breeze, making the world feel more three dimensional  I tried a lot of different techniques including cloth modifiers or re-shaping the plane and key framing the animation by hand. In the end, the best effect was created by adding a ripple modifier to the plane, and manipulating the gizmo to ripple from one corner of the page.

Some other environmental animation that I had was the flicker of the fires and police lights in the city scene. To achieve this I simply increased and decreased the radius of the lights while taking key frames.

Run Cycles

Working on the run cycle for Michelangelo  This is for a scene where he will be running up a deserted street toward a burning city, the camera will be panning overhead.

Below you can see me key framing the run.

Michelangelo's run is based on animation stills from the movie 'Hot Fuzz'

Some Artwork and Photoshops for my Animation

Just some bits and pieces of work I'm going to use in my animation.

Rigging the Models

 I started rigging the models, i was worried that , because of the Turtles high polly count, that adding bones and a skin modifier may go horribly wrong, and if it had done, my back up plan was to rig him like the robots on the previous project, just using IK chains, which would have looked awful on a character that is meant to have moving skin. Luckily this wasn't the case and the rig worked for both characters, after some faffing with the envelopes.

One problem I did have with the Turtle's rig however, was that the bones in the lower arms weren't having any area of effect, and so the upper arm bone was having to take full effect over the whole arm, hands and all the fingers, this was happening on both sides.

I never figured out why this was, but I solved it by importing the character and rig into a fresh scene and centering everything on zero in the world. The rig worked fine after this.

Ninja Modeling Skills

Since my first attempt at modeling didn't go great, I started over with some new sketches  this time making sure the character was in the 'T' position.

I think this model turned out a lot better than the first one, the character is smoother and less blocky, the skin is in one piece with no gaps and the detail means you can clearly see his features. I think I might get rid if the swords though, as they look a little odd.
While making the 3D model, I added a mesh smooth to the surface, them proceeded to inadvertently collapse the smooth into the model, by the time I realized what I had done it was too late to reverse it, and I had to work with the high polly model.

Read All About It!

So, a theme I noticed a lot in The Lost Thing, is a lot of old newspaper clippings and scraps and whatnot, to add to the untidy, jumbled look. So I thought that a good way to tell some of the story quickly would be through newspaper clippings and headlines.
I made up a few of these and I think they turned out pretty good, I think they will look good in my animation if I can figure out  way for them to flap in the wind or something.

New and Improved Artworks

So I took a couple of the sketches I drew and polished them up using Photoshop. I was quite pleased with the results.