Modelling sets

Animation is nearly finished, I thought I'll start on the set now.....

modelled the bell for the opening shot.

(MUDBOX is such a cool program)

not sure about the lighting and the low res texture.

Week 23

Still working very hard on my major, hope i can get it done for screening

Got sidetracked with some sculpting in Mud box, the model is too highres to be opened in maya, i had to lower the resolution just to get it in maya, but even the low res model wont render in draft mayasoftware, atless i got a normal map out of it....

Production Journal Shot Planning

After my 5 week milestone I have decided to start planning my shots out, I have yet to model my environment props and sets, for now I'm just using basic shapes to block out my shot. Once the animation is all completed, with the time left excluding render time, I will decided how detailed my Sets and environment props will be.

5 Week Milestone

My 5 week milestone for my Major animation was to finish off the rigs for both of my characters. I have pretty much achieved what I had set out for my 5 week milestone except for the facial expressions. I am currently working on a solution for my face expressions, I wanted to use joints to achieve the minor movements of the face and use blend shapes for the primary expression such as smile blink etc. Hopefully with a bit of luck I will be animating by the end of next week. during the 5 Weeks been having a few dramas with the rig and the JTD rigging script, nothing dramatic thou, but I honestly believe painting weights is far more painful then rigging. the reason I'm saying this is because i kept using the replace tool. A tool every teacher has told me to stay away from unless your flooding 100% with it, I guess I like learning the hard way.

I have uploaded 1 screen shot each for my characters showing the rigs and a stylized toon shaded render. I have to discuss with Jack if i decide to chose this style how would I go about rendering my back grounds and environments.

Production continues

After running into some 'rigging' difficulties, I felt it necessary to perfect my 3d models.I've been remodeling both the 'Old man' and the 'child' character, tweaking bits and pieces to add a refreshing stylized realism to my short film.

I enlarged the 'child's' head to almost 'cartoony' proportions, as it was a simple way to show off the characters youthful appearance. Have you ever noticed that a child head is massive in comparison to it's tidy body? It's a sure fire way to add a childish and innocent feel to any character, by simply enlarging the head.

Chris Borg, my well commissioned texture artist has almost finished all textures. With a few more hours spent on modeling, the typology of my characters will run so smoothly, that I will thank myself later when the task of rigging and skinning rears it's ugly head.

500 word summary

Preproduction summary

Firstly I'm glad having my story restricted to 2 characters only, I've come to realize now that with my original story I would've never finished my project. Cutting a character from my story was a real win for me, not only I've saved huge amounts of time with modeling, texturing, rigging not to mention animating. Some how the story has became more clear as well, I feel the audience will get more a clear message compared to my original story which was 10 mins all packed into 2 min.

Steve from my class is such an amazing storyboard artist, he basically finished my storyboards in an lunch break. As I described each shot to Steve, he was able to quickly sketch out exactly what I had in mind, the action, the feel, the pose, and the angle was always spot on.

My layouts was done my Marcus also a class mate of mine. Marcus is also an excellent artist, having doing my layouts he also planed out my color schemes and some action poses according to my story.

Yen, also a classmate helped me with my Character design. Yen did a superb job with my Characters. I only had a vague idea of how I wanted the characters to look like, I told Yen a few features and characteristic of my characters, he then analyzed my story and came up with 2 great character designs with so much contrast.

Calculating the budget it self wasn't difficult however getting the rates for jobs such as animation director layout artists were a nightmare, and most of the data found on the internet was all US rates. the render estimate was just pure time consuming. how ever there was a fun part while calculating the budget, and that was building a new computer. At first I was on a spending spree buying all the best parts from computer shops, then i realized being efficient was a major part of this whole budget excise. Now I'm being more realistic about the specs of the computer.

Then theres the depressing part of the whole excises, buying the software, Adobe Suit is a real bargain, it has all the programs bundled up for 1, well as a student I wont say affordable, but a reasonable price for all the program like Flash Photoshop and Aftereffects. Then theres the primary program MAYA which is priced at 5 times more expensive than the entire Adobe Suit.

Although Maya comes with a couple of bundled programs such as Match Maker and some others. their nothing more than a gimmick. Having said all that Maya the program it self is one of the best software I've ever used. I have to say getting use to the commands, UI layout and shortcuts in Maya, i feel so uncomfortable in any other 3D side programs such as Z brush, real flow and Vue.

I'm hoping I would stick to the production pipeline during production stage.

Week 14

writing up my file naming convention, render data estimate and backup plan for my animation bible took up most of this weeks time. My render data estimate came to around 60 Gigabytes including backup storage as well. 60 gigabytes is quiet a lot of storage for an 1 Min animation. Now I'm thinking back 10 years ago when I had my first computer with 20 gigabytes on it and that was top end as well. oh btw Chris has textured the old master for me heres a render