FMP – R+D Journal 2

Kinda lost track of this whole blogging business for a while, eh?

But work hasn’t stopped! Far be it from that, the project has developed quite a lot since my last post, so this is gonna be a big post covering everything I’ve done for the last 4 weeks.

Star of the show himself! Final design on my FMP character was completed in Week 2 for the first major pre-production presentation. I’m very happy with the final 2d look, it strikes that nice blend with still being recognizably skeletal and still lovable and childlike. In my presentation I set myself the challenge of saying I want my 3d model to look as close to this 2d art as possible, which at the time seemed kind of daunting what with a lot of that riding on the quality of textures, but I’ll get onto that in a bit.

Starting to build the mesh of my character, I realized that I could improve my shorts style by keeping everything on the low-poly version, even through to final animation. To that end I also modeled with the lights off in Maya, as I needed to see hoe the silhouette of the character developed from different angles.

Skipping ahead a little bit, this is my final mesh for the character.Working out the feet and hands was a challenge, the way a 3d character moves is very different to 2d in animation. If I were animating this traditionally I could cheat when it comes to wrist and ankles, but in 3d there are no such ways to do this and what you see is what you get. In the end I opted to make them separate mesh pieces so they can ‘swivel’ at the end of the arms and legs.

And here’s the final one so far, front side and back views. I’m really happy with results of texturing in aiming for the look of my 2d piece, and it was very enjoyable actually putting time into this part of the character building concept for a change. I think he’ll be very fun to animate too, assuming everything works well and I don’t run into any troubles with the low-poly aspect of it.

Also in the last few weeks I’ve been working on my storyboards, they only exist in thumbnail form right now and haven’t been scanned yet but they will be soon, as well as animatic form once my music has been produced.

Also 2 new movie reviews soon to come possibly, so watch this space 😛

Next time, environment! Till then folks.

-GC

Week 9 – The Long Overdue Post

Hi again folks, I know I’ve been away for a while but I’m back! You can pull down the missing posters and call off the police search now.

Whats happened during my disappearance? Well, this:

Its alive! Animaton for my short piece for the RJDM project has started, this being the first of three seperate clips that will string together to form an audition. To get an idea of the others, here’s my animatic I showed a few weeks ago at my big presentation:

Feedback for the animatic was really positive, Ricky O’ Donell – head honcho at RJDM – said he thinks the character is strong and would appeal to kids a lot with his physical comedy. Now its simply a matter of getting the other scenes done ASAP, my final presentation of the year is next week and they want to see 70 percent of the animation finished by that point.

ON TOP OF THAT I’ve gotten an interview for a Frontrunner position here at the University, a paid professional contract starting next January. Apparently the exam board wants someone to produce an animation depicting to students in clear a manner as possible why taking mobile phones into exam’s is a bad thing. To me it’s pretty clear why but hey, if they’re paying I’m in. I have to produce a storyboard concept of my idea ahead of the interview in January, so it’s pretty certain now this Christmas is going to be a busy one.

Oh yeah! Christmas, I’d almost forgotten that was a thing these past few weeks. I won’t lie, the festive cheer has yet to grab a hold of me but hopefully I’ll be up to my ears in tinsel and mince pies when I head home next week. All in all, I’m just looking forward to a few weeks at home where the only thing I have to think about is getting the work done.

The cogs and gears in my head are already turning for next year though, potentially the most important year of my life…so far. I talked a lot about my Final Major Project in the first few posts of this blog, about a brilliant idea I had for my FMP that I was definitely definitely going to do, so naturally I’m not doing it anymore. However! I have had several other potential concepts develop since then, one of which I’m really excited about, and if I get time next week I hope to post a few things up that go into it a bit more and see what you good people think : )

Till then my lovelies, a Merry Mid-December to you all

-GC

Week 4 – Stick To The Schedule!

 A wrench has been thrust into the works.

Above is my production schedule for the Professional Brief, of which we are now entering week 3 (though its gonna be Week 5 of the year). I’m making fairly good progress on it, sticking to it pretty good so far, and just had my first presentation this Friday just gone. I was all set to start 3D modelling my character this week, but of course wrenches are thrown into works and nothing happens exactly how it’s planned. My character, after showing it to my tutors, seems to be sending a mixed message. Though I intended him to be a villain from the start, it seems most think hero when they see him.

This is the ‘final design’ for my character that I showed in my presentation. In an effort to make him a villain, but fun and colourful as well, I went too bright in my colour scheme and was confusing people. The heroic looking ‘hands on hip’ pose wasn’t helping as well. I got a lot of suggestions on how to fix this, and after the presentation quickly whipped up these two new versions with changed colour schemes, one much lighter to emphasise a hero character and one darker to emphasise a villainous look:

Which do you prefer?

Judging by the responses on Facebook, most seem to prefer the darker design and for my character to be the villain though I’m not so sure. The simple red whites and blue I think fit the aesthetic much more, and the script synopsis I’ve come up with so far definitely fits a hero more. We shall see come the end of week 5 how this is going to pan out, so join me next time folks.

-GC

Week 3 – It Begins

Deepest apologies for not updating the blog, I simply couldn’t be arsed to be honest. OK, not entirely true, as we’re at the end of the third uni week now and big things are afoot.

We’ve had all our project briefings for the first term, and very obviously I’ve picked the one that focuses on animation, the RJDM brief. They’re a small company that operate out of Northampton doing a lot of commercial work for UK businesses, with a big focus on characters in 2D and 3D. For our brief we’ve got the task  of creating 20 seconds of SHIT-HOT (in the words of our lecturer) animation, as if its a super-villain or hero auditioning for a fictional film. Bit more boxed in than the other briefs, but still most interesting to me.

I picked villains myself because everyone knows villains are awesome, but what is a good villain? Are they powerful, imposing, muscular? Do they wear spikes, scales and armour? Do they lie in shadow through evil eyes? Thats what I thought at first, and thus my first idea was this:

Pretty scary huh? I got inspired by the great all powerful villains of comic books, Thanos, Galactus, Apocalypse, Doctor Doom. Characters that are clearly a cut above the rest and pose a real threat. His name was to be MetaCosmo, first because it sounded cool and second because it gives a good idea of where this guy is on a galactic scale and how he regards himself. I do also enjoy this design, a rare thing for me with my own work, though it went through a few more changes than this afterwards.

But the thing is, I didn’t love the idea. And despite the character being interesting, I was finding it hard to give him something interesting to do.

So back to the drawing, bashing out any other concept I could think of. There were about four more until I landed on this one:

The Ninja kid with no name! Until I think of one for him. I was watching the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series for this project as research, and felt really inspired by the way the characters were animated, something I wanted to replicate in my work. So this guy fit the bill. I wanted a lanky tall character, someone not in proportion which is normal for a teenager, and something where I could justify a lot of actions happening in only 20 seconds.

Hopefully I can update this blog later in the week with storyboards of the piece, instead of ignoring it along with my other work. But for now, over and out.

-GC

Part 1 – Out with the old…

Since this blog is going to be following me throughout my final year, I felt it was good to start off with a sort of retrospective of the previous one. Last year I chose to go with the animation brief for my final Anim Production project. Despite the fact I really really wanted to design a troll on the design brief, I couldnt pass up the chance to learn more with animation especially since I knew it was gonna be so crucial for the coming year.

The animation project brief was to create a character and two short animations based off the world of Flash Gordon, a little specific but we rolled with it. I jumped straight into designing my own version of Flash Gordon and like any great student I intensely studied the Wikipedia page for him to get to better know the character. I skewed younger with the concept to try and get something different, though in the final product I dont know if you can tell too much. Eventually I landed on this for my final design:

See the replicated 3d pose below.

It was simplified from how I started, succumbing to the will of the tutor as everyone had to in some way. But I was happy with it, it reminded me of the type of design you might see on a modern animated series, an exaggerated ‘hero’ type. I used this as reference for my sculpt too though sadly I feel he is no longer with us, lost in some office cupboard somewhere in the faculty.

Then began the 3d! Yes, we’re finally getting to it. In retrospect, after looking back over these old images I dont know what I was thinking:

Jesus! Look at all those edge loops. No wonder my poor laptop suffered last year, and that’s just the head. I definitely learned an efficiency of modelling from this project, something I’m gonna need if my third year idea pans out.

Not much to say on texturing, I’ll probably do a separate blog post on that, but same as with modelling I went a little too far, with a 5000×5000 resolution texture. Yeah.

Now to the point of this whole post, the animation. We had to produce two, one with a piece of dialogue to show off lip-syncing ability and another as  a short sketch using our characters. I’ll start with the lip-sync.

(If you don’t know the  sound clip comes from one of my favourite films, The Big Lebowski.)

A shame about the finished product on this, the effect of the ‘humour’ – if you could call it that – is lost a bit. The idea was for a sign to come down saying ‘Flash’ in big, bright letters sending him on his tirade, but there was no time to render the wider angle.

As for the animation itself, I think for a first attempt at lip-syncing its not bad. It was only after I rendered how I noticed Flash doesnt actually move his jaw when his mouth opens, which is a detriment, but I matched the phonemes quite well. I did learn doing this to create animation layers which was unbelievably useful for adding secondary animation like the fingers moving, I really reccomend anyone having trouble with animation to research them. I  have another issue with this animation though and I’ll get onto it with the next video…

The second animation took a surprising amount of time, but it was planned out completely before starting which was a first for me! Overall I was really happy with the pacing of the piece but there’s lots of areas I could improve. The animation was still too jerky for my liking, too many keys will do that, and the environment and lighting were really hastily thrown together at the end along with all the sounds and music. Those are things I’m determined to devote a lot more time to next year, hopefully gathering my own sounds and making my own music too.

The issue I have with this one that I mentioned just before the other one has is a lack of mobility. Flash is pretty much rooted to the spot in both and barely moves his lower body. This really limited the strength of the poses I could get and made it a lot less dynamic, again as you could guess, something I dont want to repeat this year. But on a more positive note, I finished the whole thing with two days to spare! No literal last minute submission for me, I was well on time.

The pose from above replicated in 3d

Anyway, I think that’s enough self-judgement for what has turned out to be a rather lengthy post, so stay tuned for part 2 where I’ll outline my plans for the next year and my final major project.

– GC