Brace yourself, changes are coming.

So not long ago I had a conversation with my lecture, after a feedback session and she is worried that I may not be able to finish my film for the deadline which is a few months away. I slightly disagree with what she says, I think I can get the characters modeled, rigged, animated, rendered and edited together in time for the hand in. What I do agree with my lecture is that my story really is not up to a good stranded and I think that I do no have time to work on it as well as doing all the other tasks I mentioned in the above text.

So my lecture proposed a merge with another fellow student. as her story is there, however her technical ability is lacking and we feel that I can provide that support she needs. So I decided to ask Sancha the student who I was suggested to ask to work with, and I emailed her telling her what one of our lectures told me and ask her if she would be willing join in a partnership. Once I got her respond I could tell that she was a bit nervous at frist about it but she agreed to meet up for a briefing of her film since I had not see anything it before hand, as she hardly turns up to lecturers and critiques. Anyway, so we meet up, Sancha went through her film with me, which is about five autumn type creatures, which are all based off different nuts/fruits/fugues you can find in the woods during that time of the year. There is a red berry, blackberry, mushroom, acorn, and a conker. The story is aimed at young children and is about these five creatures who like to play all day, but one day, a human comes along and picks the mushroom up and takes him away. The other characters are upset that their friend has been taken away, they deiced to pool their resources together, as each one have one of the five senses, touch, smell, sight, hearing, taste. they travel outside her home, through tall grass, and cross rivers; finding clues along the way, eventually they discover the mushroom character and rescues him.

I am a bit worried about there being five characters that need to be modeled, rigged, animated, and this did make me thing I only have two (I understand that one was a cartoony, cuddle dragon), but the fact that there are two of us, eases that concern. I have been assigned to make the mushroom, and redberry character for now, which is cool. I was also given her production bible to help me understand her film and what she wants, some concept stills and her animatic......which in all fairness is a bit poor, it is more like a story board and even then it just acceptable in my mind.

Here are some of the stills, concept and animatic that I was given from Sancha.

THIS WORK IS NOT MY CONTENT, ALL CREDIT GOES TO SANCHA PURSEY.




This Character I am modeling is called Red Berry

This Character is called Mushi Mushi, he is the only who gets stolen.

Here is the animatic that Sancha had made, this is meant to help me animated when we come to that stage and to tell the story, through visuals and audio.

THIS WORK IS NOT MY CONTENT, ALL CREDIT GOES TO SANCHA PURSEY.


I do like her designs for her characters they are rather trendy and appealing, however I have a few massive complaints about them. for a start they are way too flat and when using them as reference when modeling this can cause issues later on, another problem I have which isn't anyone's fault really, but it is that these characters do not really have a neck. and I have recently watched Lost and Found and fantastic short film from Studio A.K.A which is based off the children's novel of the same title. In the behind the scenes footage they talk about how in the oringal drawings from the book, the boy in lost and found does not have a neck and in CGI this makes it much more difficult to have the opitum amount of head movement, so they had to include a neck anyway. so I believe I will have to do the same thing and raise this point to Sancha just so that she knows to do the same when modeling the other characters.

Created by: Oliver Jeffers & Studio A.K.A

                                                          Created by: Oliver Jeffers

                                             Created by: Oliver Jeffers & Studio A.K.A

                                                         Created by: Oliver Jeffers


As you can see that in the orginal drawings from the book, the boy has no neck but in animated adaptation they have given him a neck.

Update on Alex (CG Version)

I have been working on both Alex and the Dragon in Maya, over the past weeks I have finished with alex's shape and I am rather happy with the outcome, I may have to do a tweak here and there next week., but next week will mainly be about creating a face for her, which will be a new thing for me as I have never made a face in Maya, I am sure it will be interesting to say the least.

As for the Dragon I did start him off in Maya, but because I haven't spent a ton of time creating him as of yet, I have taken the advice of my technician and have a go in Z-brush which is a program which acts in layers like Photoshop but in CGI world rather than a 2D one that Photoshop uses. Z-brush is also better than Maya in making very detailed and refined CG models and since I want to be a modeler I thought it would be well worth a shot plus I get to use a new program which might help me later on in my life.

Here are a series of Screen shots of me creating Alex in Maya, you will see me starting with a blocky head and slowly fleshing it out until I got my almost final result the final moments of Alex in terms of her mesh will be when I add the eye balls, mouth and nose. I still need to texture and her.

 A lot of the work at this stage was to just clean up the wire framing of the mesh so it would when texturing comes later on and rigging the mesh will bend and react in the correct and best way possible by having a mesh that is not messy.

Here I was nearing the end of shaping out Alex's mesh body and when merging together the different shapes I had to be careful of missing points in the mesh that needed to be merged together.

 Here is one of those points that I missed earlier on but found and addressed the issues as it was causing neck line to distort.

 Alex's mesh here is all cleaned up and I have placed for extra edge loops around parts of her body were a joint will be so when I add a rig and bind it to her body the bends in the mesh will react better.

This final image is Alex in with a early rig put in place, I think I might have to start the rig over again though because I have not placed any clavicle just before her arms, which this will effect any subtle movements I want to do with the arms.

I bring forth reassuring news my fellow readers. I have invested in a subscription to the website Digital Tutors. This website helps in lots of different media programs such as After Effects, Maya, Flash, Illustrator, etc. Sadly it comes at a price of roughly £30 a month which at the moment is a bit of a strain but it is much better than what I get from the three grand a year I have to pay to be in university.

Anyway moving back onto topic this service will greatly help me in everything tondo with Maya and at the moment I really need the help, i am currently making the eye and eyebrow, the eye was really easy to make which I thought was going to be much harder but this is Maya for you if it seems hard it is normally easy but if it seems easy then it should be balls to the wall hard. I'm still forming the eye lids for Alex but I have created the eyebrow for Alex and put the details in her hair but I an having a challenge with the eye lids. I know two of my class mates had trouble with eye lids for their characters so they might be able to give me some extra pointers so that is good.