Scary Time!

Now that I've got the finalised mesh for Alfi I can begin rigging. This is a bit of a milestone for me as it's the realisation that very soon we'll be animating, which is quite exciting.

One of the main things that I still need to do is organise how we (Sonja, Iain, and Myself) are going to work on the animation. There are a few main tasks:

1. Make up a scene priority list, so that we can divide the work as fairly as possible and get to work on the hardest scenes first.
2. Work out how I can edit the camera settings in a scene without overwriting work that's been done on the animation ( I know that doesn't really make a lot of sense but ironically that's part of the problem -I'm not sure what I'm dealing with! I'll clear this up in a proper post when I've figured it all out)
3. Collate all the materials that are needed for production into one folder that can be distributed to the other animators without maya scene files losing the paths of texture files and references.
4. Establish how much time Sonja and Iain can dedicate to the project and then plan the work they will be doing accordingly (this actually follows on from task #1 on this list)

Unfortunately this is not the limit of this list, it's just all that I can remember at the moment! I think that will have to be my main task tomorrow, figuring out what not got a rock solid plan of attack for.

Another super quick one...

today:

1. spoke to John Harrison. had good chat about some technical and artistic issues. realised this project is the first one I've ever worked on where stylisation has been a planned option, it's liberating but also complicated -it creates more decision making tasks.
2. realised that a lower poly version of the mountain bike that Alfi wants will look better than the hi poly version that I've been working so far. by this i mean that it will work better stylistically as the hi poly bike will not fit in with the environment around it.
3. saw the near finished version of the Alfi character model. just a few things to change and then rigging can begin on Monday :)

Super Quick post

stuff I did

yesterday:

1. got feedback from Robin Slone about my proposal and bar a few small points (mostly grammer etc) he seems happy with it which hopefully not too much re-writing is needed.
2. Got Sonja Geracsek on the team to help out with animation :)
3. met with Ken Scott-Brown about organising the use of the HIVE for the production of Alfi's Bike so i'll be able to do regular screen tests of the stereo effect.

today:

1. am now part of the organising committee for the Abertay 2010 Degree Show
2. Have realised that for best optimisation of scene size i'll use PNG files rather than PSDs
3. figured out that my folder hierarchy and asset management was unusable for other people so i need to change it and make sure it will work for other team members.

Pipeline

I've decided that i should approach the production of certain assets by creating a base mesh, Uv mapping that mesh, and then manipulating it to create unique models without having to start from scratch every time. Although I've not tried it before and have no idea how successful it might be , I'm confident that this will save me valuable time in the long run.

It is a this point that i realise that a book with tips on how to be more efficient with asset production would be really useful. I'm not aware that such a book exists but maybe i've just not been looking in the right places.

Pre-Production Doc

I think I've finally cracked how I should personally tackle the Pre-Production document that we have to submit for Gregor's module. I've broken my essay down into three chapters:

1. Visual Research - The art development eg. mood boards, storyboards, concept art etc.
2. Technical Research - Professional practice in stereo 3d pre-production eg. learning about how S3D works, how do they do it all in industry.
3. Academic Research - The aim of the project eg. what research has been done surrounding Stereo 3d, how am I going to do my research.

I've not written part number 3 yet but that's just a case of summarising the finding of my Lit Review that was part of my Project Proposal.

Hopefully this is what Gregor is after, and from my interpretation of the brief, I'm pretty sure I've covered all the bases.

Good luck to anyone out there still trying to write theirs!

New Video log

New books

an update on my reading list

The Art of Wall-E

The Art of Up

The Art of the Pixar Short Films

Drawn to Life: Volume One

walkies :)

just a quick walk around the woods by my house

woops!!!

just realised that i refer to previous research in that last post but it's not actually posted on here!

oh well. it might be a little bit backwards but at least you can see what i was rambling on about. :)

google maps is your friend

environment research images using google maps steet view. a very handy tool :) (captions explain what they are below)

the above images are all visual research for how shops look when they're on a hill. where the doors are in relation to the windows etc.

I was trying to figure out what kind of shops there would be in Alfi's town and had a look around south queens ferry which has already been part of the inspiration for the look of Alfi's town.

Progress

A late Merry Christmas and Happy new year to all!

Unfortunately its back to work for me and it’s been ages since i’ve posted an update so this is gonna be a bit of a beast.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I’ve got some more people on board to help me with the project so I’ll take this opertuntity to introduce them

Scott Hilton has kindly offered his services as “the audio guy”. Scott is a great addition to the team (feels a bit weird saying that) and is great news for a project that would otherwise have been completely silent seeing as I have next to no time to do that kind of stuff. Scott has been working on finding a signature sound for the music and gathering sound effects that we’ll need for the film.

Iain McCallum has also volunteered to help me out with animation too which is great. Iain has only just got into the project but hopefully when we get back to uni we can start working a little more closely on ideas for improving the animation and tackling the problems that lie ahead.

Despite the lack of updates here things have been moving along nicely with the project over the Christmas break. The character design by Andy Rennie is how finalised and as I type Andy’s working on the 3d model. Personally I’ve been working a lot on the environment and backgrounds, which you can see below.

as you can see the textures are still fairly rudimentary (or non existent) but i've been trying to make quick progress so i can get a better picture of how it might all work together.