When the footed was edited backwards, the storyline was a lot more unclear than we thought it would be. Instead we decided to leave the film in a chronological order, with this being the final outcome:
This is Monty - a fully rigged character who somewhat resembles Mike Wazowski. The rigged model was given to us to animate in Autodesk Maya, which allowed the movement of his legs along with bodily squashing. The task was to create two different walk animations: a walk cycle and straight ahead walk.
As it sounded to be the more complex of the two I decided to animate the cycle first, but found it easier than expected. For the straight ahead, I used the 'Animator's Survival Kit' to help time when he should bounce.
Tails has be reused for this animation. This time I created two different obstacles for him to interact with: a basic stool and a small fire pit. This allowed me to experiment with fire dynamics which appear to be pretty complex due to the large amount of modifications that can be made.
In the playblast the fire appears as a green gas, but when rendered using Mental Ray the final image is much more appealing.
Walk cycles look fairly complex to draw, so I decided to keep the character's design very simple. Although the drawing itself is very rough, the animation is looped on threes and works well, but it's easy to notice that the shoulder movement is very sharp.
Texturing the model proved to be very time consuming but completing the task left me with a feeling of accomplishment. I had many errors with rendering the textures with mental ray - many of which quickly resulted in a navy blue screen. I overcome this by exporting the texture file as multiple different image formats and found that bitmap solved the problem.
This animation was the most demanding so far and, therefore, the most challenging. The task at hand was to design a character and draw a turnaround sheet. The same character would then be animated to jump onto a diving board and into a pool of water - with splash! This is Finn.
Say hi, Finn!
Although there were many aspects to consider during the animating process, (such as squash and stretch, the board springing and timing the splash) I thoroughly enjoyed bringing Finn to life.
For the cinematography element of our course we are required to work in groups to create a short film. The overall idea for our film begins with a suicidal girl whom is shown heavily drinking before lifting a gun to her own head. A friend enters the room and snatches the gun, causing her to become overly aggressive towards him. A fight breaks out, which results in the friend accidentally shooting her. The final shot of the film will show the girl laying beside the gun with him standing over her. However, the footage will be edited backwards, meaning that it will not be until the audience reaches the beginning of the story that they will realise the girl intended to commit suicide and that the shooting was an accident rather than a cold blooded murder.
The footage was recorded throughout two days before it was ready to be taken into post production.
UV unwrapping took much longer than anticipated, but is finally complete. Although Remy is not a photo-realistic fox, I am building a small collection of fox images from Google to use as reference for his potential colour and textures:
Reference for the body and tail.
Reference for the face - particularly mouth and ears.
When I began texturing the model, I found that (when applied) the textures were very low resolution. I have taken a new UV snapshot of approximately 8000x8000, which seems to have solved the issue.
Prior to retopology, the Remy model consisted of over 9 million polygon faces and it was crucial that the density of the mesh was lowered for later rendering and animating.
I found myself starting the process from scratch multiple times due to the edge flow looking inconsistent, which was particularly noticeable on the face. I overcame this by deleting half of the model and then mirroring the geometry in order to achieve symmetry.
The Remy model after retopology.
The new model is made up of 1,528 faces and can be easily manipulated in Maya without the software freezing up.
I have since realised that leaving the mouth as an empty hole looks strange, so I created a tongue and teeth. To add further detail to the tongue I extruded the central edge inwards to create the natural crease. The next goal is to unwrap the UVs for texturing in Adobe Photoshop. I would like to experiment with fur as opposed to a flat texture, but this may take too long to render in time to meet the set deadline.
This task was easily the most fun out of the assignments so far - perhaps because I have an interest in visual effects. The objective was to create a smoke cycle in Adobe Flash.
I created the smoke on two separate layers which was significantly useful when it came to calculating the timing for each puff of smoke. I am pleased with the flow of the animation itself, but dislike its over-all appearance. The initial plan was to fill the scene with different cycles including a dripping tap and flashes of lightning in the window, however I will probably create these as individual animations.
Since I now have a graphic tablet, I figured that I should redesign the animation. It made sense for the kettle to be much larger to fill the frame so that the animation can be seen clearly. The art style is still very simplistic, but I feel that the animation works well regardless.
This assignment requires me to create a character that can be modelled and textured using Autodesk Maya and Mudbox. I used elements from the original drawing to create multiple sketches of how the character might look, and then decided upon a final design that would be suitable for the task at hand. I could then create drawings of him from the front and side to be used as templates for modelling in Maya.
Through the rough shaping stage I strictly worked to my image planes, however I decided to make the legs longer and his head smaller. The suit will be modelled onto the character, but the hat iscurrently a separate model that can be removed from his head. As the character is somwhat simplistic, I was able to complete this stage fairly quickly before importing it into Mudbox for the rough sculpt.
Stage 1: Rough shaping in Autodesk Maya
Stage 2: Rough sculpt in Autodesk Mudbox
Although I have previously used Maya for modelling in college, I have had little experience with Mudbox. The result of the rough sculpt is somewhat sloppy, however it was my first attempt at using a graphic tablet. The model will now be imported back to Maya for retopology.
