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Hall of fame poster Design - University of Bedfodshire July 2023
Introduction
Introduction
This short film is based on one of the many timeless stories of Lord Hanuman, set during the search for Goddess Sita. As a group of forest-dwelling people comb the southern region of India, they reach the seashore, realizing that Sita may be found on the land beyond the vast ocean. However, no one in their army possesses the strength to cross the sea except Hanuman. Struggling with forgotten powers due to a childhood trauma, Hanuman is initially unaware of his abilities until a fellow member reminds him of his true strength.
The film aims to recreate the essence of the 2D animated tale of Hanuman in a new 3D animation format. By focusing on a single central character, the animation vividly portrays Hanuman's personality, showcasing his dynamic movements and immense strength as he prepares for the monumental leap over the ocean. This focus helps align key moments of the story with his rediscovery of power, making the character's journey emotionally resonant.
To enhance the visual storytelling, the project incorporates outdoor environments and natural elements, including realistic water and cloud simulations. These advanced animation techniques add depth and authenticity to the world, making the film's action sequences and environments more immersive and physically engaging for the audience.
Pre-Production
Pre-Production
The vision for this project was well-defined from the start, with a focus on capturing the natural landscape of southern India. Reference images were gathered to accurately depict elements such as large rocks partially submerged in the land and sea, sandy beaches, and distant clusters of ancient trees with thick foliage. The background also featured long, interconnected mountain ranges, which, from afar, appear as a continuous chain but are revealed to be one after another.
The main character was designed with a familiar, powerful physique resembling that of a giant, muscular figure. Although the character’s face bears a likeness to a monkey, it conveys a calm and gentle expression, much like a slow-moving river, aligning with the character’s personality and story arc.
Inspired by the original 2D animation, the scene begins with the camera zooming out from the sea, gradually revealing the main character. The animation focuses on the moment when the character is reminded of his forgotten powers, retrieving his weapon with an expression of calm joy. This is followed by a dramatic display of strength, where the character grows in size and takes a powerful leap, soaring through the sky. Reference images for this sequence were sourced from Google, and the storyboard was created using Krita, with additional assistance from Photoshop.
Vision board
Story board
Production
Production
Modeling: Several tools have been used for character modeling such as extrude, multi-cut, insert-edge, combine, bridge, bevel, merge and most importantly playing with mesh vertex as per the image planer. For modeling head poly cube method was used and sculpting, therefore face has more polygon count around the chick and jaw area.
Environment was build around the scale of the character. Mountains were made using sculpt tool with hand brush and brush shape was created in Photoshop retrieving alpha only from the image as well as sand ground. Trees and rocks are prefab taken from Turbosquid 3D platform to save time. For water sim, a plan cratered and for clouds sim a spear was used.
Texturing: Applying texture to character needs help of UV Editor, as of the character any chosen image can not be directly implemented on to character because of the body parts and different cloths for the body part. Therefore, using UV editor allows Maya users to several tool kits, this technique knows as UVW mapping which defines the way a texture is projected onto 3d model. As the character is from medieval era, aiStandardsurface was applied with presets of skin texture with grains to make it look like fur.
Maya has multiple options for applying any image maps with the help of aiStandardsurface. Therefore, different files were made in Photoshop to define base color, specular color, bump value and alpha channel.
Water sim is made with aiStandardsurface using Geometry noise and adding animation in noise attribute of time in contestant.
Cloud sim is made with aiStandardvolume in which volume material has been assigned with 2 colors in transparent.
Rigging: In rigging mode of Maya; Simply by selecting a body mesh and going to character controls just by clicking create skeleton a user can creates a skeleton for a mesh in which Forward kinematics let user transform and key joints directly, where as Inverse kinematics let user transform and key an IK handle to animate skeleton which is helpful for global-directed movements. For the body rig , Quick rig technique is used and to create hand and tail HumanIK was used. Then skinning took place where mesh was bind with skeleton, which decided how character’s muscle movements will look like.
Animation: Firstly, I learned about blend shape to create facial expressions for the character where the most common method of 3D facial animation involves morphing or blending. In maya Blend shapes of facial muscles helps in layout and effective facial animation must combine multiple shapes. Some captain blend shapes such as jaw open, smile, narrow the lips, sad mouth, upper lip up, upper lip down, lower lip up, lower lip down, brows up and down and brows squeeze are helpful to create further blend shapes for Facial animation controls.
Moving to advanced animation there are principals for it, Squash and stretch, Anticipation, staging, straight ahead action, pose to pose, follow through and overlapping action. While animating conforming these principals’ attendants clarifies the Animations in action visible and convincing to the audience. In order to create smooth animation time editor plays a good role.
Lighting & Rendering: This project uses Physical light as a light source for the scenes, which has features of live open sky with sun. With help of Turbidity, Elevation, Intensity, Sky and Sun tint and Sun size it generates very user-controlled sky atmosphere.
As per every process, rendering is one of most time-consuming process in 3D graphics generation and animation. This project has Arnold rendering, which is one of the best renderers has been provided by Maya. In order to capture what 3D objects would look like in real-time. As I am using only 1 moving camera for this project, and as of the 2-minute video’s criteria 2880 frames will be in the rendering with the resolution settings 1080. After completing, 3 steps for this particular process were really slow also the images that are getting generated had grains which was not up the standard. So, in order to make this process quick and to clear the grains off of the images, I have taken help from the Arnold by making changes in clamping and adding a default plugin known as Optixdenoiser.
Post-Production
Post-Production
Frames were divided to be rendered in 14 different systems therefore I used Adobe Primer pro to combine different frames and put together in Primer pro for final editing such intro of the video, background music and end credits.
Conclusions
Conclusions
Over all, audience has saying that this artifact is detailed with animation movements and purely depicts the story of “Hanuman”.
I learned the basics concepts of each process in production. I faced difficulty with modeling character specially the face which still needs bit of work and due to close to deadline; did not had much of time to teak the angles of cloud sim and physical sky to get a good lighting on the scene which I managed to do it after my submission. But all in all It was really fun experience learning blend modes, making water and cloud simulation, animating the tail and with the help of new high tech I was able to create sooth Advanced Animation.
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