I tested the animation and rendering of the flower in bloom. This is the effect obtained so far, reached my expectations, can give people a bright feeling. The little flower’s personality is naughty and lovely, I will continue to make anthropomorphic animation according to the plots.
The principle of the flower’s material is the same as that of the old man. In substance painter, I added a lot of texture details to the flower to make the 2D visual model more three-dimensional. In order to give the flowers a better sense of light, the shadows of the petals are set to purple-blue, and the lights are pale yellow. However, the specific tone needs to be carefully adjusted in nuke later according to the environment.
The little flower is the protagonist of this animation. When designing the model of this character, I referenced the appearance of the hoya carnosa to design the current model. The flower has five petals, and a pistil resembling a petal and a five-pointed star. The pistil is the heart of the flower. In order to let the flower to freely move, I use the bend function to make two kinds of rigging for the flower. The difference is that one can allow all the petals to move together, and the other one can allow each petal to move alone. At the same time, the rigging of leaves and flower stems are made by IK Rigging, so they can be bent and manipulated freely.
I animate the walk circle for keeper to test the rigging of the character and the rendering effect of the texture. So far, everything seems to be working.
The material of the character is completed in substance painter, and the principle is the same as the materials of the bell tower. But I made some adjustments to the aitoon material node in maya in order to get the brush texture. I combined two normal maps for each model, including a normal map exported by substance painter, and a normal map with brush texture. With direction light lighting, rendering can get a hand-painted style.
The keeper’s model is complete. I first made a simple model in maya and then sculpted the details of the model in zbrush, especially the wrinkles of the clothes and the texture of the hair. At the same time, for animation, I used the advanced skeleton plugin to do the rigging of the character.
As for the character design of keeper, I want a serious but cute little old man. In the animation, he is a serious parent type who maintains the overall environment of the bell tower, including the flowers and plants. In order to keep the bell tower and the flowers and plants clean, he would clear away the superfluous and wantonly growing flowers and plants. But he was reluctant to use force to solve the problem unless he had to. So I designed the very thick eyebrows and beards to cover his eyes and mouth, in order to create a solemn old grandfather.
In order to create a bell tower, I did much research and looked for many reference online. I prefer to build a European-style clock tower. It doesn’t need to be serious like big ben. It’s just a cute and simple bell tower in a small town, so I design it to have three parts. The first part is the main building with windows and door, the second floor has four large clocks on four walls, and the third floor is a arched pavilion with a large bell inside. Meanwhile, I add some simple European pattern on the walls, pillars and clocks. For hand-painted style materials, I only made basecolor and normal map of the clock tower. On basecolor, I used noise in the black mask of the color layer and added blur slope, blue directional and Sharpen. This method can produce hand-painted brush strokes to achieve hand-painted visual effects. Luckily, I managed to get the hand-drawn effect I wanted.
My plan for FMP is making a short animation. I am interested in this style，and wanted to make an animation that could be fun and healing. So I found a lot of illustrations and non-photorealistic rendering animations as reference, in order to study their production and painting brushstrokes. Create my art style.
The name of this short animation is Wild Growth. The idea of making this animation is to encourage us to stick to the path we have chosen and not shrink back because of other people’s doubts or difficulties. The main character of this story is the flower under the bell tower and the caretaker of the bell tower. The story begins with a little flower waking up in the morning. The little flower grows very tall in the grass. But the keeper is obsessive-compulsive and wants to keep the tower clean. So he cut off the little flower. Then a small flower peeped out from the grass, saw the administrator leave, and directed the flowers behind them to grow upward. When the flowers reached the second floor, the keeper saw their shadows. The flowers thought they could climb to the second floor and see what it was like outside the bell tower garden. But the wall was so high that it didn’t see anything. Just then, the caretaker climbed up. The flower closed her eyes and pretended not to see. When it opened its eyes again, it saw that the keeper asked him to go down, but he refused. The caretaker wants to clean up the unrestrained growth of flowers. But Tengman wrapped himself around the keeper’s arm to help the flower grow upwards. The flower grew to the top of the bell tower, and its companion excitedly shook it to show it the view outside. When he opened his eyes, he saw that he was following the keeper down the clock tower. It suddenly froze, still unable to see beyond the wall. After thinking about the film, it looked up at the bell tower.