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

Week 13

Being falling behind with the journals due to last minuet rushes to hand in my bible, During week 13 I started to rig one of my characters, it is a long and slow process, but i believe I'm getting the hang of rigging although theres a lot more to learn about character setups. towards the end of the week we touched on Z_depth in After Effects in Darren's class. Now I'm thinking how I can use Z-depth in my animation.

WEEK 12

This Week Yen's finished the model sheet for the Master character so I able to proceed with the modeling process. Modelling the Body was pretty straight forward, but modeling the head was a different story. For about 4 hours I was struggling with just blocking out the head. from box modeling to plane ad spine modeling nothing seemed to work. Then I realized the head is pretty much the oval shaped like a football, that then gave me the idea to start off with a sphere and just scaling it in the y direction, from there I was able to block out the head in no time. I spend the next hour or so sculpting the mesh in Mud box, now I feel I'm getting some where with the Mesh. The biggest problem now is that The Masters head mesh is already way too detailed for both his own body and the Monk character and I've still got the scaring on this forehead and some other details I want to add. However I'm spending too much time on the modelling process, which was a big mistake I made last year. This year I want to be able to spend more hours on actual animation. Anyway heres a quick render of what I got so far. Background is a photo but my set is going to be modeling based on this photo and some others.

WEEK 11

During this week I've been stuck trying to fix the typology of the head mesh for the Monk Character. My initial mesh had the wrong typology around the mouth area which did not loop from the mouth and up the nose. The most annoying thing is getting the typology right after numerous amount of hours and realizing the model looks different from the original.

on the Left is the mesh with the right typology and the one on the right is the old one. they look like two different characters now. I think I'm better leaving it for now and move on to something else as it is really doing my head in.

WEEK 10

Finally finished downloading a Video tutorial for Maya lighting which began downloading 2 1 week ago due to my slow internet connection atm. Once Yen finishes the model sheet for the Old Master I'll go into the modeling process, but for the mean while I'm helping Yen with the 3d components for his Major. After modeling ducks water waves and the duck stand Yen and I sat down together and talked about the color scheme tweaked some of the lights set up in the Tent scene.

WEEK 9

Using Steve Lacasto as key storyboard artist, I felt my choice was wise, as he produced the completed second pass on time. Due to amount of camera moves within the piece I was reliant on an artist competent in perspective pieces.

I've been trying to maintain a good contrast between the two characters, as a fight scene, edited with quick cuts can often prove to be somewhat confusing. The size difference between the monk and master is enough to give both characters clarity, but perhaps a colour scheme will help push this envelope further.

Collecting more references and colour palettes for my mood board, I've handed off some thumbnails and some direction to Layout artist Marcus Binge, to help with both staging and presenting of characters in key combat poses.

I've been studying "how to Draw Manga; Combat" in search for interesting keys and correct lines of action conserning both punchs and kicks.
Now i will go over the second pass storyboards, Looking for revenues to cut down on animating time.

My monk character has been fully modelled and textured, and is ready to rig, though this procedure will be very time consuming. I'll have to construct the rig, and figure out what acrobatic limitations it might have for the stylised monk character. I am asuming high kicks will force the mesh to deform hideiously, as the monk has quite small legs. Perhaps master Stretchy inverse kenetics will offer me a solution, or at least mask the limitations of the rig with some squash and stretch exageration.

Week 8

During the last week of the holidays I unwrapped Monk Character and managed to model some hands for him too, but the main focus for this week was still the face I wasn't too happy with the initial head mesh, I took it back into Mudbox and started tweaking away until I was happy with the Mesh. Once I got the head looking more like what I had in mind, I started to give him so expressions then did a simple 3 point light setup in Maya and rendered a couple of stills. Having a few renders with different expressions I then picked out my favorite one and painted some eyebrows and the 6 dots in Photoshop to see how it would look like once I painted the UV.

Week 7

Due to no access to the Internet my week 7 and week 8 blog haven't been posted until now. but never less I am working very hard over the holidays.

During week seven Yen gave me the model sheets for my Monk character and i was able to get started on the model. Again the hardest part of the character was the Head and attaching the ears.

First I used Maya to block out the head with the right topology, then exporting it to Mudbox as an obj for reshaping and adding details.

Week 6

During the final week of this term I've finished timing the first pass of my storyboard, keeping in mind that the complexities of the choriographed fight needs to be planned. I've been looking at Street Fighter sprites for references on key animation. Since the arcobatic nature of the animation requires exagerated limbs, i've been pestering Jack about Stretchy Inverse kenetics.
Yen's tent has been fully modelled and textured, with renders for both night and day scenes. Yen was very pleased.

WEEK 5

Above Model sheet was done by Yen, 3 colour layouts was drawn and coloured by Marcus and the expression sheet is done by Both Marcus and Yen
During week 5, I have been revising correcting and finalising my script.
Steve helped me with my thumbnails and Marcus finished a couple of layouts for me, I also corrected Yen's model sheets for my one of my character. I started to topologies one of Marcus's Characters, while also working on Yens 3d Tent.

LI.

Week 4

During Week 4 I finished the treatment and started a few drafts on my script.
Clay models are at its final stages now too, once the models face gets abit more smoothed it will be ready to be scaned. Towards the end of the week ive finished my visual effects essay based on Avatar and Hell boy 2. now im upto my layouts and halfway through my thumb nails.

WEEK 3

week 3.
This is my first week back, been chating up with all the stuff ive missed.
originally my story had 3 characters and it went for 3 mins, for the first part of the week I've been concentrating on cutting down my story to 1 min and slashing 1 of the characters. in darren's class we did some tracking in compositing, then shot some footage for a remote exploding. For jacks class we touched on basics of rigging and joint orientation.
by the end of the week, I finished my characters model sheets and stared to sculpt the character, for some 3d scaning.