Set design

basshole · Post by **basshole** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 7:10 am

Wow. Suddenly I am dangerously close to being ready to build my "set", the last step before recording my actors' voices and beginning the animation in earnest.

So here's the deal: Everything basically takes place in a house, specifically, an entrance hallway that feeds into a living room. I guess the house could be two stories, if that helps me (there will be combat near the end with lots of jumping and other ninja-like stuff, so they need some room to move around).

So we basically have one room, and the way I figure it, I need to be able to see any of the four walls from both a "camera perpendicular to the wall" perspective and a "camera parallel to the wall" perspective, that is, with one or two walls receding into the background.

I am going for an Aqua Teen/Sea Lab look with this, meaning, camera is always directly perpendicular to a wall or directly parallel, no "angles", unlike say, the Simpsons, Family Guy, etc. Still, I figure that each of the four walls will need three renderings. . .dead on to camera, parallel from one side, and parallel from the other side, which means an object, like a couch, against that wall, would have to be drawn from three sides, the front, right, and left (though the right and left views could just be flipped images of each other since the couch would likely be symmetrical).

Am I on the right track here? Any thoughts? I'd like the characters to be able to stand anywhere in the room. Trying to figure out how all this would work.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 8:26 am

I would do a storyboard. Determine exactly what scenes you want and need. Then you only have to create what you need. If there is a fight scene then a storyboard would be important for determining the action. Saves time on rendering and set building.

-vern

basshole · Post by **basshole** » Mon Mar 09, 2009 10:58 am

I may have to. I was trying to get away with an all-in-one solution, since I know me and I'll break the storyboard anyway.

I can do at least one wall in its entirety from the perpendicular to cam view, since that's the angle from which how I envision most of the scenes playing out. Maybe the intersecting walls can be so wide that you never see the intersection/corner. . .in other words, no matter where in the room someone is standing, you only see one wall behind them from any given angle. I dunno. I'll figure something out. Thanks.

basshole · Post by **basshole** » Fri Mar 13, 2009 1:59 pm

Ok, I know it's obnoxious and stubborn, but it seems like this idea will work if I change the set size or the character size on frontal views of the character to compensate for where they are in the room (e.g. if we're looking at the front of a character at the front of a long hallway, we should see the hallway recede behind him, but if he's at the back of the hallway, we should only see a little bit of wall behind him, dig?)

Instead of thinking of it as drawing each wall three times, I'll think of as drawing the room from four sides, one view looking dead on to each wall, with two other walls foreshortened and sort of expanded outward. Very geometric (anyone remember Maniac Mansion?) It seems like it'll work. If I stick with symmetrical objects (tables, chairs, etc.), then once they're drawn from the front and side, I just reverse to get the other side's view.

I just know if I storyboard I"ll get to a certain point and realize I want this view I never thought I'd want after all. Cause it happens to me.

It's not THAT bad. . .there are basically two sets in this entire piece. . .a single living room, and then a entrance hallway that'll feed into a living room in a different location. And one exterior shot of a house that I will only draw one way because no action will take place outside, only used to establish scenes.

basshole · Post by **basshole** » Mon May 25, 2009 11:35 am

I see it's been about two and a half months since I've been here.

This was, predictably, harder than I thought, and the results are not quite perfect, but I think they'll pass muster for all but the most critical folks.

Anyway, here are the pics of two interiors from four different angles each, drawn (or, at least a valient attempt was made to draw them so) in one-point perspective, which I accidentally had to learn about to get this halfway right. When I realized that to really do it right, I would have to deal with equations, I started eyeballing things. I think they came out pretty well:

[/img]

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Mon May 25, 2009 1:39 pm

That's quite good, especially if you've just learnt to draw in perspective. However, stairwall_1 and windowwall_1 have a mistake in there. The group of furniture has a different perspective than the rest of the room, and the dark hallway in the first one is totally off. If you use 1-point-perpective, you need to apply it to everything in a shot, and all to the same vanishing point.

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Mon May 25, 2009 5:10 pm

Agreed, very good work.

ST makes some good points, but overall I don't find these
discrepancies too jarring. Some of it depends on if you plan to
use these mostly zoomed it. Then a "local" vanishing point is probably a good idea.

basshole · Post by **basshole** » Mon May 25, 2009 10:05 pm

OK, yes, I see your point, and technically, you are right. However, I realized on those "long views" where the camera is perpendicular to the longer walls, that if I actually put the point of view in the middle of the room things on the side walls and objects in those areas would distorted to the point of looking totally bizarre, so yes, I settled on two "localized" view points. One is hear the mantle area, the other near the stairs/front door. The middle of the room, where tile meets carpet, just had to be a compromise.

As for the dark hallway, I felt like I wanted to show the, um, geometry (?) of that area rather than the correct perspective. I believe I realized that even using my localized viewpoints, you'd only see a sliver of dark wall and floor and it would look really bizarre, so I cheated (don't tell my mom).

You will rarely see any huge portion of these rooms at once, and if you do, I can live with it.

Maybe this style should be called "basshole-point perspective".

The house interior was built this way to facilitate a giant battle at the end of the short film (it is about Jewish ninjas, after all). So I wanted a house that had the main living area being fully two stories tall (so they could jump around), and the balcony/hallway that runs the length of the upstairs seemed logical to go with that. Also, it might cute to have someone leap from the first floor, land upstairs behind the balcony, run the length of the hallway, then jump back down to the first floor on the other side of the room.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Tue May 26, 2009 8:13 am

objects in those areas would distorted to the point of looking totally bizarre

You just have discovered one of the secrets of animation backgrounds: 1-point perspective only works in the nearest area around that point.

The vanishing point should best be inside the visible frame. If it's outside, then it's already time to introduce a second vanishing point, effectively constructing a 2-point perspective. That's the part it gets interesting (for me): bent lines, cylindrical perspective, elongated objetcs for fast pans, and so on.

In animation it is "allowed" to have different perspectives in the same background (that's what it makes cartoony design in 3D so difficult: 3D can't mix different worlds easily). However, certain rules are still valid. The vanishing point of your hallway should be on the same horizon as the furniture, otherwise a pan from the furniture area to the hallway will give the impression that the camera had moved vertically without doing so - a very eery experience.