Final Week

Over the last two weeks, I managed to created a short blender demo as proof of concept for my fairy tale "Happy Prince" 3D puppet show. I mainly focus on the Act I of the play due to time and tech limitations.

After settling the puppet effect last week, I started to create the prince model and texture. It is very hard to choose the material for the prince because such texture while being gem-like, shinning and crystal, also needs to show the silhouette of the prince clearly. Also gem-like transparent texture takes time to render in Blender and there were frequent errors in shading and rendering when I was trying out the different textures. Eventually, I created this texture for my prince status. It is between crystal and rock so that the status is neither too reflective(can't see the features of the status) nor too hard(can't relate the status with gem). And I really like the color scheme for the status, very dreamy and fairy-tale like!

After long time of preparing the property, the actual animation process took much less time. The only issue I encountered was the speed. In Blender rendered mode, the animation is rendered at much lower frame(since it is real time rendered). But when it is actually rendered as a video, the speed became much faster. So I had to go back and adjust the speed of the animation.

Another problem I found was that the animation is too short for the whole background story introduction. Therefore, in my final rendered video output, I decided to add a pre-intro with black background and white text. In my vision of the final product, the intro would be an animation of someone approaching the puppet box(camera approaching), then a hand appearing and opening the curtain. There will be voice over at the same time saying "Happy Prince is my favorite fairy tale since I was a child...".

I eventually created two output: one is the rendered video, one is watching the puppet show real time in Blender. I think I preferred the real time puppet show more because I can watch the show at different angle and perspective and it also made the puppet show feel interactive and real-time performance. The part I liked about the video version is that I can add music, various effect and edit the speed more accurately.

Here is the video rendered output:

Here is the Blender file if you are interested in the real time Blender version of the puppet show. Link to download: drive.google.com/file/d/1CJjr8bneM-d-yAHO2ecGk9Zi73TxlX1e/view?usp=sharing

This Week Edition:

In this week, I first refined a couple of things in Act I that I was not satisfied with. First, I changed the curtain animation from sliding to stretching and compressing so that the curtain would not go over the box when opening. It also makes the curtain looks more realistic. The second point I changed is the lighting. The previous lighting was very chaotic and there was lot of asymmetric and weird shadow due to bad lighting. Thus I recreated the whole lighting referencing the lighting in staging and photography. To improve quality of rendering, I changed the render engine from Envee to Cycle, which is much more powerful and can render many details and particles. The revised version of Act I can present much more details of the material texture and better light reflection.

I also started creating physical text boxes in Blender for the script display instead of relying on subtitles because I wanted to show the script not only in edited video but also in Blender real-time. I decided to go for paper-note style for the text box.

I also created the swallow figure for ACT II, which was the first conversation between prince and the swallow. I decided to go for the plush cartoonish style according to my character sketch.

I will definitely keep on working on this large piece! but for now I am pretty satisfied with what I have accomplished.