Electives | Berni Bozsik Yr1

My very first idea for this project was to create a doll-house interior. However, as I started working in Maya, my ideas shifted to creating a gothic room instead. I began to collect references from illustrators including Vincent Mallie and Charles W. Stewart.

I began by learning hard-surface modelling, working on the furniture and panelling first. I had a particularly difficult time navigating Maya’s marking menus – right clicks and mouse dragging. I find keyboard shortcuts much more useful, even if I have to learn different sets for different software – this was a huge disadvantage for me.

Other than that, modelling was relatively easy. I inserted edge loops, offset edges, bevelled them etc. until my shapes had begun to take form. One unexpected difficulty I immediately ran into was scale – it was actually quite tricky to figure out object’s sizes relative to one another.

I used a sweep mesh tool to create both of the picture frames – it allowed me to easily add details – small indents along the borders. I then made sure to delete the history once I was happy with their appearance. I also made a door. I created the panelling on the door individually as the symmetry tools I found a bit confusing. After many face extrusions, scales and translations, I completed the pattern on the door. Unfortunately the fall off of my lights later would mean none of these patterns actually get seen!

The window panes were unglamorously created through stretching a cube to be very long and thin, rotating it +45 or -45 degrees in the X axis and duplicating them many times before combining into a single mesh.

The ropes were made of EP curves, as well as the curtains. The curtains I made with the following method. I began by drawing out an ep curve very carefully, thinking about how fabric might fold. I then duplicated the curve. I repeated this, visualising the shape of the curtain until using the Surface > Loft function to connect these curves.

Texturing was a lot of fun as it truly made my 3D models come to life and feel real. I created lots of different materials, some myself, some from pre-sets and others were downloaded textures from Polyhaven. I used the aiStandardSurface as a base for all of my shaders.

The alignment of textures is far from perfect, especially as seen here on the wallpaper I downloaded. However in this case, it might not be an issue as real wallpaper is not always perfectly aligned. My subpar UV unwrapping skills become more evident when the grain of wood is going in the wrong direction of where the armchair’s leather pattern appears patchy.

The textures on the books would only be seen from afar – so I did not UV wrap them individually. The dark line near the top of the books was actually accidental, but I liked the detail it gave so I kept it. I wanted the soft pale wood of the bookshelf to contrast with the rest of the dark wood panelling. Additionally, this bookshelf was mostly inspired by Vincent Mallie’s illustration I’ve included at the top of this post.

I experimented a lot with lighting. Ultimately I ended up using a range of area and point lights, playing with the settings, intensities, and exposures. I think the most valuable thing to change had been the colour of the lights – warm oranges and cool blues create very different moods. Below, I show the effect each light has on the scene.

The area light in the top right corner is very distracting and looks unnatural. This is why I actually ended up putting it inside a magical bubble. In my final render, it appears as though the bubble is emitting light. I especially love how the lights react with my reflective materials like the frame of the mirror.

I ended up creating another camera with a wide angle lens for the animation. I set two key frames, then played around with the graph editor to create ease ins and easy outs. I was also able to modify how rotations and translations changed at different rates.

For animation, I downloaded the Stewart rig from Animation Mentor, then changed the default orange colours to black to turn him into a little shadow boy.

I experimented a lot by trying to animation him jumping a little. However, I could not control the rig well enough and ended up making a total mess of the geometry in certain areas. I decided I would not be adding complex animation to my scene. Not only would it distract from my environment, it would also be too ambitious considering this is my first Maya project.

Instead, I opted for a simpler animation and did a rough 2D test of it in Krita.

You can view both of these animations here:

No matter how much I tried, the shadow boy simply did not fit into the armchair! His legs would not drape over the armrests properly, or his torso was not long enough to lean on the other side. Ultimately I decided to make him sit on the set of drawers and swing his feet.

Exporting this animation was a whole other issue. It took approximately 8 hours to render at 540p, however upon rewatching, I realised this quality was far too low. Another render (and many long hours) later, I had a high quality sequence of PNG images which I could then import into After Effects.

At first I tried adding nose and playing with the colours, but later realised adding a simple vignette would be enough.

Below, I have my completed renders for this project. I particularly like the top one it has an appealing, balanced composition using the rule of thirds and the bubbles and well-placed. The contrast between the night sky’s deep, cold blue and the interiors soft warmth is particularly effect. For the bottom image, I do like the latticed shadow cast by the window panes – this is something that was tricky to achieve and required a lot of trial and error with rotating the blue-hued area light. However, I wish more of it could be cast on the door to the right – it falls completely into shadow – we cannot even tell it is actually a door.

My final animation can be viewed below. Though I think the sound supports the eerie atmosphere and the camera movement displays the scene effectively, there is something off and washed-out about the video. This was the highest quality I could export it as within reasonable time – and yet I do not think the textures look convincing enough. Next time, I will experiment more with normal maps and bump nodes – I think the shaders should have been more rough and textured – there are too many flat and matte areas. However, I do overall like the atmosphere created – especially with the purple glowing bubbles refracting the room around them to create a surreal, dream-like effect.

For this elective, we had to record an unscripted 15-second audio to the theme “London.”
I decided to interview my friend, and chose a piece of dialogue which reflected a lot of strong personality and attitude.

Then, using the audio, I began to explore different character designs. I wanted to depict a historical setting so I looked at early 19th century clothing styles to begin designing my character. Below are some initial character explorations.

Character Inspo:

Fashion Explorations for Antoine:

Now, I also wanted to create a second, contrasting character who this first character (Antoine) would be talking to. I wanted this character to have softer colours and more smoothed, curved shapes in direct contrast to Antoine’s strong red waistcoat and sharp shape language.

Initially, I decided to make Bella, a very meek-looking quiet character, however this would have created an obvious power imbalance. I wanted a character who would not just wordlessly accept Antoine’s torrent of unsolicited advice, but be abhorred by it.
I made her a more vibrant purple in the second version, giving her a haughty and spoiled impression.

When Antoine says “If you see a rat scurrying into an alleyway, you do not follow it to give it a name”, they will point to Bella’s hideous little dog, to which she will take grave offence. Unfortunately, this design did not make for a convincing dog. When posted, I’ve had over ten people think it was a cat.

While working on refining the character designs, I also created a very rough animatic. I wanted to use two different camera angles, one focusing solely on Antoine and another where we reveal to the audience who he is talking to.

Then, I had to decide on an environment for them, initially, I wanted to put them in a gothic-style parlour, where they might be talking over tea. However, I suddenly had the idea of putting them in a train setting as this would also make for better storytelling. This could create the impression that a young noblewoman, Bella is headed for London for the first time. However, her peaceful time of reflection in her cabin is interrupted by Antoine, an eccentric noble who becomes exceedingly passionate in giving completely unsolicited advice, warning her of the dangers of London and even insulting her ugly little dog in the process.

Environment Mood board

Here, you can see the two rough sketches I had of the background, then a rough colour experimentation with a Turner painting pasted into the painting hung above the seat.

I then proceeded to complete the two backgrounds, creating clean linework before shading use a range of layer modes. For the final piece, I will need to create more layers for the outside world as the train speeds past, however this would be best done in the compositing stage, which is beyond my current scope of this project. I drew both backgrounds as 3840 by 2160 pixels to make them twice as large as the final video output will be.

I used a stormy, tumultuous Turner painting to go above Antoine’s head and a calm still life by Mary Moser to go above Bella’s seat. Additionally, the lamp on Antoine’s side is crooked to show his eccentric nature where Bella’s is perfectly straight to reflect her perfectionism and fastidiousness.

Following this, I drew up an X-sheet, carefully scrubbing through the audio and recording the different sounds being made at each frame. I also moved each sound up two-three frames so the mouth shapes happen before the sound is heard. Secondly, I have started planning thumbnails on the x-sheet but I didn’t do this completely as I realised I preferred planning separately so I drew the rough poses in a different document.
The x-sheet proved to be very helpful during the animation phase.

Here are some of my thumbnail sketches and pose ideas – I worked on some of these from observation but I also acted out all of the movements myself and looked at that for reference.

I’ve also thoroughly studied an absolutely beautiful pencil test from The Prince of Egypt – the subtlety of the acting had my jaw on the floor. It was phenomenal and wonderful to analyse.

Below are Antoine’s mouth shapes I drew. Initially I wanted to give them lips but I ended up going with a simpler line for a mouth. This is common for more masculine characters – otherwise it may look like they are wearing lipstick.

I then started animation. I worked in Toon Boom Harmony at 24fps, animating on twos (although some frames are held for longer).
I began by drawing in my key poses super rough. I worked from the 41 reference videos I had filmed of myself, as well as my own imagination and knowledge of art fundamentals to create the poses. Ed Hooks’ Acting for Animators was a very useful resource in helping me understand characters better. For developing Antoine’s personality, it was also helpful to thoroughly study characters with similar attitudes – notably Tulio from The Road to El Dorado and Kuzco from The Emperor’s New Groove.
It made me especially happy that, when I posted my work on social media, people likened Antoine to both of those characters without being told they were the influences!

I cannot entirely describe my animation process – I created 5 complete passes of Antoine’s acting, reaching countless dead-ends and difficulties. It was a lot of trial and error and pushing through that helped me get the animation to a polished stage. It was especially helpful to think of only one thing at a time – for example I animated the hair straight ahead on a separate layer – this helped me implemented the principle of follow-through and make the hair bouncy and dynamic.

In the video below – I show all iterations of my project from storyboards to rough animation, to cleanup and final coloured animation. You can view my progress here:

I drew the shadows by hand, using a blending node set to multiply and a cutter node to ensure shadows did not extend outside the characters’ bounds. This was a very tricky process, especially because the location of the shadow changed depending on the orientation of the body part it was on. I should have done a separate illustration to better understand where the shadows would be at different points of the animation. I also do not think the shadows are very accurate considering the lighting inside the cabin, however, this does not seem to be distracting or obstruct the storytelling.

Love through a Prism inspired my shading style.