Conclusion

The aim of the project was to design and create a character with convincing behaviours. I think my Balloon Boy character does this a lot throughout my film. He touches on a lot of emotions but mainly the character is usually elated or distorted! It was quite challenging to get a clear emotion out of a balloon because without the use of a body it meant that the face had to exaggerate his behaviours. The character himself I think is quite likable and matches the ideas that Disney has been producing recently in their Pixar movies.

Throughout this module I have had to make a lot of design decisions to get things right. One of the main decisions was to cut three of my scenes and add two new ones. This was difficult because I did liked the cut scenes a lot but I didn’t think they were funny enough or they would be hard to achieve.

I have tried to use new techniques in this animation for example I have used Controller Sliders, Deformers (FFD Boxes), Morpher Modifier and lip syncing. It would of been nice also to use the a Reactor modifier but after a lot of trails it didn't really work for me.

Overall I have enjoyed creating a character that was a bit different to the ‘norm’ and voicing all the vocals myself was quite fun. It would be nice to develop the model more so that it could be stretched and manipulated more like a balloon would be able to. I think 4 to 14 year old's would enjoy the trials and tribulations of Balloon Boy and I hope they'd learn some things about the real world.

Final Render

The last stage of the development was to edit my videos in Adobe Premier Pro but this wasn't without problem! The issue I had was that Premier didn't like the codecs that I had used in Max, for some reason the MJPEG codec that gave me the best results in Max couldn't be used in Premier!?! After searching around the Internet I couldn't find a free codec to use, so I had to resort to encoding them all again using Adobe Encoder. This time I encoded them as MP4s. Once In Premier I needed to add a few transition stages in the film so the sketches faded nicely together. I originally wanted to do seven sketches and title each with the day of the week. But as I only did four I decided to title them Morning, Afternoon, Evening and the Next day. This I thought would give the sketches more of a story feel. This was a decision that I pondered about for a while because I think it may of looked better just having each clip fade into each other. After watching the final cut I think now the transitions may go on for a couple of seconds to long.

The Outro/Credits

For the outro/credits I wanted to link it nicely with the last scene. The last scene fishinesses with the screen in total darkness so I thought it would be nice to carry that into the credits.So instead of just having white text with a black background I decided have black text with a black background but use a directional light to slowly flash the text in then out. First I had my own name flash up and then when the light dies down I animated the text out of the way and replaced it with the Balloon Boy logo.

Throughout the credits I played a silly outro tune that complimented the intro. I also had to add the fly! I thought it would be fun if he ended up surviving and you never know he might appear again in a later Balloon Boy episode!

Scene Seven - Part 2

In the second part of the scene Balloon Boy looks down and laughs at the fate of the fly not actually realising that he is in trouble. I wanted to show of a few different types of emotion. First I want him to be happy and a bit cocky next I want him to show panic and sadness then finally scarred and petrified. This would be hard to get them emotions across in a small space of time.

To set this scene up I first added a camera to the scene and linked it to balloon boy so when he moved up the camera would follow him. Next I created some clouds. This were made simply by going into the Gizmo panel then choosing the Gizmo Box from the Atmospheric Apparatus drop down. Here I created lots of random boxes in the rough shape of a cloud. Next I went to the environment and Effects window and choose Volume Fog under atmospheres. Then I could pick the Gizmo boxes from the section bellow and change the parameters to make the cloud look realistic.

The clouds were then duplicated and position above the balloon so he past them. This would give the impression of him rising high into the sky. I also added a windy sound effect to make it some like it was a bit more turbulent up there.

In the back ground I positioned a 747 Jumbo Jet (turbosquid.com) that was on a collision course with our main character. This ended up being the trickiest part of the scene. First I needed to scale the Jet up so it looked realistic, next I had to make the Jet hit Balloon Boy at the exact time and at a high speed. I did this by changing the animation tangents to linear so the Jet didn't slow down. I also had to place the Jet along way back in the scene so it looked fast and was in the background for the hole scene and try. It wasn't as straight forward as I thought it would be!

Finally I wanted to give Balloon Boy a final face of terror. To do this I used the FFD boxes I created earlier. The problem I had with these boxes is that I couldn't get them to move with my model for some reason. (Wouldn't link!?!) So what I did was place the boxes at the top of the balloons trajectory so when the balloon reached them his eyes would stretch. I also added the sound of the Jet to co-inside with the scream.

Scene Seven - Part 1

The first part of this scene is meant to give a reason for Balloon Boy to be let go outside so he can be hit by the jet. I liked the idea that the fly is the reason that he goes up. The male character I did at first want to be a little girl but I thought the hand looked like an adults. (and I would of had to find a girl to do the voice!)

The fly starts to annoy the character he moves around. Here it didn't look very realistic because the string looks like a solid rod. As soon as the hand opens the string shoots out.

In the scene I pointed a directional light on to the hand to give a nice dark shadow inside the hand. This was good because even though I added a my own skin material and bump map it didnt make the nails on the hand look good so the shaddows helped cover these up.

Timing the animation to the voice recording was the key here to make it look believable. When he says "Take that fly" the hand must close shut the fly must be in the hand and the fly sound must stop all at once. Once rendered it look quite good. It was quite a lot of effort to do such a small scene but I thought it was essential to get the sketch going and it broke up the amount Balloon Boy will be seen.

Scene Seven

For this scene I needed a human hand to hold the balloon. The hand model was downloaded from turbosquid.com and then placed over a biped. The next stage was to add a skin modifier to the hand. This would prove quite tricky because all of the vertices had to be weighted properly to each finger. After a lot of tweaking I finally got the fingers working, although it wasn't perfect and there were parts of the model that crunched up, but it looked O.k for the short shot I needed to take.

I was thinking of having Balloon Boy in shot but there were a couple of reasons why I didn't. First the hand looked too small if he was in the shot and it looked strange that only the hand could be seen. Secondly I wanted the string to act realistically so I tried to use the rope reactor but it didn't seem to work properly because I couldn't get it to move like it was attached to a balloon.

New Scenes - Storyboard

Here is my storyboard for my new scenes. These scenes came to me while I was creating the first two scenes so I decided to give them ago because they looked like they would be fun to do and they would be amusing.

• Scene 7 - This is going to be the final scene in the animation it shows the hand of a male character who lets go of Balloon Boy because the fly starts to annoy him. Balloon Boy then rises up through the clouds looking down and laughing because the fly has been bugging him also. The sketch climaxes when a 747 jet crashes into him.

Intro Scene

For the intro I already had an angle that I wanted to lean towards. I liked the style of the Old cartoon intros from the 40s and 50s. Cartoons such as Merrie Melody's, Loony Tunes and Disney used a simple intro that was easily recognizable.

The character would be at the centre of the animation and sometimes they would say their catchphrase with a silly tune playing as backing music. Taking these ideas into consideration I wanted to make sometime similar.

Firstly I searched the internet for good background that wasn't too bright and would would compliment the colourful Balloon character. Next I looked on freesounds.com to see if I could find a silly song to grab peoples attention.

The balloon shaped font was called Greetoon Highlight. This was created by adding a extrude modifier to the text then copying the text and then moving it behind but this time with a bevel modifier attached to it. This made the text bulge out making a nice thick border around the text.

The idea to has the singing balloons rising up through the screen came to me late. The vocals on the song made me chuckle so much that I wanted to add some kind of animation to them. As this Balloon Boy cartoon would part of a series I thought it would be right to give it a strong into and the other different coloured balloon may turn up in future sketches.

New Scene - Balloon Animal

Looking at my story board I felt there needed to be a balloon animal sketch. I'm not to sure where the sketch will go in the sequence but I feel this isn't important until I finally put the sketches together. The problem I had with animating the balloon animal was that it would be very difficult to animate hands and the the balloon twist into shape. My first thought was to use a trick that 2D animators would use, they would draw clouds to show fast moving and busy animations, for example fight scenes would often have arms and legs poking out of the cloud.

As this is a 3D animation I couldn't find away to recreate this so I thought it would be nice to just concentrate on the facial expressions of the main character. I recorded some distressed vocals that Balloon boy could be lip synced to and I found a nice sound effect of a balloon being twisted and rubbed. Combining these two effects with some eye movement I was hopping to trick the viewer into thinking there was something else going on.

In the final part of the sketch the Balloon animal in shown in full. Here I added the sound of a child laughing to accentuate the embarrassment Balloon Boy may be having and the fact that he has an audience. Last but no means least I added the fly that was in scene two. I thought it would be nice to have a recurring joke that will slightly link the sketches together.

Scene Two

Scene two gives the viewer a insight into the kind of predicaments and bad luck Balloon Boy gets him self into. Keeping the scene simple and uncluttered was my first design choice. The use of a simple lamp shade would be only object in the scene. The lamp was downloaded for free from an internet site (www.turbosquid.com).

The scene had two key elements; light and the fly. It was important to have the light go out without the scene going to dark. To do this I used two lights one was a directional spot light that shone on the lamp and Balloon Boy and the other was a omni light that I placed right on the shade itself. This light brightened up the shade and emitted a bit more light onto Balloon Boy.

The star of the scene I think is the fly! He buzzes around the light and character until the light goes out and he lays to rest on the end of his nose. I thought this would be an amusing little end to the sketch. I tried to make the fly turn nicely in the air like a real fly would. First I animated the positions I wanted the fly on the time line then I created a utility for the fly. In the Utility panel I clicked on 'More' and then chose 'Follow/Bank'.

Scene One

Through out my storyboard I hadn't put any consideration into the background of each scene. I know I wanted most of the scenes set indoors but I wasn't sure how I was going design this. My first thoughts were to have Balloon Boy live in a average looking family home.

Scene one starts of with Balloon Boy being inflated close to the camera. I wanted to keep him close because I thought it kept a little trepidation before the whole character was introduced. Next I wanted the character to look like he was opening his eyes for the first time. I liked the idea of him being born like Frankenstein's monster so I gave him a line like the one from the classic film.Once he says his line I wanted to give him a beaming smile. This would tell the audience straight away that he is a happy and cheerful character.

The scene was put together by using the control points, camera zoom and syncing the mouth by using the Morpher to match the sound that was loaded into the curve track editor.

The scene I created had a back wall with wallpaper, a lamp and a silly picture on the wall. I wasn't to sure if I liked the décor or if it would look better without these items. What I needed to do was a bit to research into backgrounds. After looking on you tube for a short while I realised that a lot of short animations kept the backgrounds blank. This emphasized the characters within the scene better.

Above is the background style I am going to keep throughout my film. Because the module is focusing of the character it would be wise to leave out needless parts of the environment. The background was created by adding a blurred picture into the environment background parameter.

Storyboards Explained

The name of my animation will be called "The Trails and Tribulations of Balloon Boy". This is a tongue and cheek reference to the the bad luck he goes through. I want to make some short sketches that showcase different comical things that happen in his life. Balloon Boy is a likeable character that seems very excitable and happy. But that happiness soon turns to sadness when time after time he gets hit with bad luck.

• Introduction - The intro will be a simple 2D animation with an happy jingle and Balloon Boy inducing himself.

• Scene 1 - This will see the birth of Balloon Boy. He will slowly gets blown up and enthusiastically says "I'm alive". (quote taken from Frankenstein; "He's alive!").

• Scene 2 - In this scene Balloon Boy rises to the ceiling next to the light shade. He's up there for a little while before he try s to get someone attention. Next his bad luck continues when the light goes out and a fly lands on his nose.

• Scene 3 - This is a short scene where Balloon Boy gets dragged towards a wall due to static electricity.

• Scene 4 - Here someone is undoing Balloon Boys knot. He pleads for them to not do it but he ends up flying across the scene and ends up splatted up against the camera where he slides down with a screech.

• Scene 5 - Scene five starts with a 2D into saying "Balloon Facts" next the scene sees Balloon Boy telling the viewers a interesting fact.

Storyboards

Morpher Modifier - continued

Above is a picture of Balloon Boy smiling.



Above is a picture of Balloon Boy being sad.



Above is a picture of Balloon Boy screaming.



Above is the screaming Morph but I have stretched the eyes by moving the control points on the FFD boxes. I have also made the pupils bigger.

Morpher Modifier

To create the different facial expressions for my character I experimented with the Morpher Modifier. With this modifier I could set up the different expressions that are connected to simple controllers that are found inside the Morpher parameters. The problem I had with this modifier was getting it to work with my eye rig. I connected the helper point between the eyes to my face mesh and that's worked fine. The eyes moved with the head but when I move the Morpher on the face mesh for mouth movement and expressions, the eyes don't move with the face! After a lot of testing I resorted to the fact that there was no way of linking the eyes to move with the Morpher. My only alternative was to manually animate the eyes up and down with the movement of the head.

My Balloon character was nearly complete but I needed to make some finishing touches on him. First I changed the colour of him to a bright blue. This I thought would make the character stand out better and the colour blue is widely linked to boys. To give the balloon a realistic look I gave the balloon some a reflected material. This was achieved by adding an environmental jpeg picture to the Reflection map. I also wanted the balloon to be slightly translucent, so I lowered the Opacity in the basic parameters.

In the picture above Balloon Boy is in his idle state with no facial expressions. I will try and use this state when his face relaxes and not doing anything.

Above is Balloon Boy with his mouth open Wide.



Here Balloon Boy has his mouth open (medium).

The last picture Balloon Boys mouth open at his smallest size. Here you can see the geometry behind the mouth. This is because of the opacity had been lowered. I felt that this looked o.k but any more and the geometry would show through too much.

Eyes **NEW** Test

Eyes **NEW**

First I started with a sphere and then Cloned it in the same spot. I then changed the hemisphere size for the clone sphere, this created the top eye lid. I then cloned the eye lid the create the bottom lid. Next I changed the central eye balls hemisphere down to 0.035. This would act as the pupil.I then created a multi-sub object in the material editor with two colours. Back for the pupil and white for the eye ball.

Next I added a a Slider from the Helper/Manipulator tab. Click on the first eye lid then right click and choose wire parameters. Here I selected object/value and dragged the pointer on to the eye lid. Then I right clicked again and choose Transform/Rotation/X Rotation. A screen pops up where I selected Both directions and then select. Once this was done I played around with the sliders parameters to get the Eye lid working properly. I then repeated the process for the other three lids. I also used the same method to make the pupils grow when the slider is moved.



The last thing I did was to add some FFD boxes around the eyes. Once in position I then used the 'Bind to Spacewarp button to connect the eyes to the cage. This will come in handy if I want to make the eyes look like they have expaned or deflated.



Finally I made a controller so my eyes could follow. I created a helper point in front of the eyes and then went to the Motion panel and choose 'Assign controller' and selected 'Rotation'. Next I pressed the small button just above this panel. In the pop up box I chose 'Look at constraints'. I then clicked on 'Add lookout target'. I also had to select 'Z' and 'Flip' so the pupil was facing forward.



Once the eyes ere added to the Balloon model I though they looked pretty good. They looked quite different to my original eyes because they stuck out quite a bit and I couldn't add any eye lids to the last model very easily. These eyes give me a greater control over the way they can move which should ultimately make my character display his emotions better.

Balloon Boy - Video Test Two

The eyes and the eye brows were animated separately after the lip syncing, they were not apart of the main model. The eyes brows were not totally flush to the balloon because it would be hard to move them up the forehead at a slight angle so I animated them moving directly up and down. The problem with this was that from side angles the eye brows seem to be floating in front of the face! This is something I needed to look into.

Balloon Boy - Video Test One

The first thing I noticed when trying to animate him was that I needed to move both the top and bottom of his head when he talked. This was because it didn't look right with just his bottom jaw moving because the balloon looked like it had to much weight or mass, like a human head. By moving the top and the bottom of the balloon I made the character look lighter and unstable.

Balloon Boy - 3D Testing

I have taken my character and tried to make him 3D. This would be a test to see if it was a good idea to give him features that either protruded inside of the balloon or out of it. My original idea was to give Balloon boy a 2D face.

The Head was made from a simple sphere the eyes were made by using the 'Insert' feature once it had been turned into an Editable Poly. The Mouth was created by using the 'Extrude'. I then coloured the different parts of the character by using the Multi sub-object mode within the material editor.

I liked the way the shape of the balloon changed when moving him into his different mouth shapes. This is something that wouldn't happen naturally if I just added a video to the balloon boys fetures. I didn't add any eye lids for now but if I do use this version I will do later.

Balloon Boy

Here I have developed my Balloon Boy idea a bit further by creating a better image of the character using Photoshop. The first picture is a exact copy of my original sketch and the second has more colour and eyebrows.

The question is how am I going to create the eyes and mouth because I don't want the mouth to look 3d. I would rather the facial features to look 2d and painted on like a party ballon with a print on it. This is something that would need to created outside of 3ds max, most probably in Flash.

Facial Expressions Research

The facial expressions of the character can be vitally important to convey the emotions that they are going through. The are over 40 muscles in the human face and these muscles combine complexly to show different emotions. In the Preston Blair series there are twelve Phoneme mouth posses that can give the expression of a character talking. These shapes can be pre-prepared before the actual lip syncing of the character animation has started. Using the 'Morpher' modifier in 3ds max will give nice realistic movement of a human face but this is quite a tricky method because the model need to be well made with good features like lips and cheeks that are easily able to be manipulated without problem.

Animals are often used by Disney to create interesting characters in their animations. The animals often have very humanistic facial shapes to show their expressions, this is because the animators want the audience to connect with the character and to easily understand what emotions they are going through. The Disney character Micky Mouse walks upright and his mannerisms are very human, this is also true for his fiscal expressions that more resemble a young boy than a mouse. Pluto the dog isn't as human looking as he walks and acts like a dog. Facially he primarily tries to be more like a dog but because Pluto doesn't talk he needs to show of his emotions by changing the shape of his mouth and eyes which will also make him look more human, this is especially noticeable with his lips.

Disney Cartoon - Pluto's Playmate

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAEdJc3RBg


Drawing out all the different facial shapes of your character seems like a good thing to do as it prepares yourself for when you start animating. Below is lots of different expressions that a Disney lion Cub character could make within a story. Each facial shape is worked out before hand and that shape will now be the slandered shape for that expression throughout the movie.
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Humans have lots of different expressions that look subtly different, which are sometimes hard to distinguish between. To help understand the expressions character animators will exaggerate facial expressions so they are easily recognisable. The subtle expressions might easily be missed or misconstrued by young children so exaggerating them is a good policy for animating for children. Below is a set of expressions for a bold cartoon man. Each expression has subtle difference's like one eyebrow up and one down for being dreamy, of both eyebrows down when being bored.

For one of my initial ideas I have come up with Balloon Boy which uses just facial expressions. The character has no nose or ears which doesn't really matter when animating a human style because they don't move. For my initial sketches I left out the eye brows which I think would be a mistake as they will come in handy when trying to convey his expressions. Below is a bunch of simple smiley faces with different moods that I think matches the style I want Balloon Boy to have. These will be a good reference if I go ahead with this idea.