Thursday 6 December 2012

White Canvas Scene

And another quick update to let you see how the 'unaffected' scenery is coming along. That is the blank canvas. Llogari has been playing around with the lighting and come up with this intense lighting that creates some awesome shadows. We plan to have another light that is just on the characters to stop them disappearing in the shadows altogether. Here are a few snapshots of the first scene to be animated to show the lighting. It is the valley scene.




And one last picture, a close-up of Carl's eyes...


Textures Complete

A quick update on the studios progress. With the completion of our character rigs the studio has been busying themselves with animating and lighting. Unfortunately we were victim to the delightfully buggy Maya 2013.5 extension meaning 10 seconds of animation is only accessible at uni but we have persevered.
We also now have all the texture maps completed with two versions of the environmental maps so that the scenery can change accordingly as the characters interact with it. As planned the textured were painted and sketched by hand and scanned back onto the computer to create as realistic effect as possible.
Textures

Saturday 1 December 2012

Character Modelling: Carl and Simon Fully Rigged

Here are our characters fully rigged with all controls, as well as skinned jaw movement and blinking eyes. All that is left to do is add a joint to independently manipulate their skirts (no matter how you skin them, they constantly clip the legs at some point, so by adding a joint, we can position the legs first, then adjust the skirt so that it falls over the legs with no clipping issues), and some expression blend shapes (as our characters do not speak at any point, we're only going to add basic expressions that fit to the story).
Carl

Simon
(Slight problem with the right foot. It has deformed for absolutely no reason. All vertices are weighted as they were before, so I'm not overly sure whats happening?)

Friday 23 November 2012

Character's Progress

After Steven did an excellent job modelling both the characters with all the details I was tagged in for laying out the UVs. Hair is yet to come but the models are ready to come to life :D Exciting stuff.

Carl
Close-up

Front

Back

Simon
Close-Up

Front

Back

Also Included... 
Their Shiny Eyes

And a Mouth


Monday 19 November 2012

Character Modelling: Carl Complete

Other than adding his hair, replacing his eyes and stitching his limbs together, Carl is complete!

Friday 16 November 2012

Character Modelling: Base Head Progress

After starting over with the head (twice...), it appears to be almost complete. All that is left to add at this stage is the hair and the updated eyeball and then it'll be complete!

Thursday 15 November 2012

Environment Re-Design

The feedback after our pitch presentation was to explore a simpler environment. The characters in our story are highly stylized and are metaphors for Religion and Science so it didn't make sense to place them in a real world setting. As a result the script will be altered to allow for the change in story and we're looking at creating a white space environment. In our first plan the set was only to be revealed after the characters had interacted with it to so their creation of the world/history so the suggestion at the pitch was to return to a similar style. The following images are of some influences I found to inspire the redesign. Mostly one colour or a cut out flat style.


 


Here are my concepts...
The White Forest.
How the forest is when it's undisturbed. A blank canvas.

Carl's Painting Forest.
These are digitally painted but would be hand painting for the final animation.

Simon's Sketch book Forest.
Again the shading of the trees will be hand sketched. This style
includes a sample of da Vinci's handwriting across everything...
...As this close-up shows.






To give an idea of how these settings might interact I've made a short animatic to show the changing. There are two styles in the same video to see which would work better. The first 10 second shows the idea of the trail... only the specific area they've touched changes. The next 10 second shows the whole forest transform after them.



I also looked at a coloured forest... completely green, to give another style for the studio to choose.

Tuesday 6 November 2012

Environmental Concept Art

Finished Concept Art for the Forest Interior and the Riverside. They show the moods we want to create in each scene as well as the use of block colours as the scheme for the setting.