Final render and Project rational

Here is the Video that I submitted

















Project Rational:

"Character Design, visual style and functionality" was one many choices of brief that we were allowed to pick, I chose this one in particular since I find the field of character design and animation of great interest, and whilst the "Body Dynamics, weight and impact" looked like a lot of fun, and "Character animation, dialogue and communication" looked like a great chance to explore the aspects of delivering a believable performance in CG, I felt that the former would allow me to explore away from the bipedal, life based models that I've been used to working with so far.


I relished the challenge of finding only three out of hundreds of possible characters from Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Finally choosing the trio of Guardians from Dream's fortress. My reason for picking the guardians is that it would be a unique challenge to attempt non-biped models for the first time, and by taking on three different models, I felt that I could iterate a first attempt, and continually improve through subsequent iterations.

I did a great deal of sketching for each of the three guardians, which were the Wyvern, the Hyppogriff and the Griffon. The Wyvern was a pleasure to re-imagine, as there are a great many ways to reinterpret a creature such as a dragon, and I experimented with lots of shapes and proportions in my pre-design sketches, which were done loosely in Photoshop.

However, when it came to redesigning the Griffon and Hyppogriff, there was a bit less leeway, since source material inferred that the two creatures were physically similar, yet I wanted to create designs that gave each one an individual vibe by exercising some artistic license with my design choices.

During the course of modelling the characters, I explored different ways to model functional wings for each of the characters, my favourite outcome being that of the Wyvern, which, whilst heavily stylized and physically impossible, had an overall aesthetically pleasing wing design and flying animation, though I did run into some issues with attaching cloth groups to CAT-bones, an issue that I would like to revisit again in my spare time.

Luckily, the internet and media has a great deal of relevant source material, I sought this in the form of aviary flight videos, natural world photography and special effects predecessors that tackled similar subject matter such as "Walking with Dinosaurs, BBC".

Thankfully I had learn a lot of lessons since the last project, and whilst time management was somewhat of an issue again (Due to external circumstances) I felt that I'd coped better than previously in terms of budgeting my time to fit deadline constraints, and made best use of the informal extension to fiddle out some of the creases in my work so to speak.

Thankfully the rendering checklist idea paid off and I managed to get it all rendered and edited within good time, with no hitches!

My goal next term is to expand my horizons and explore more rigorous lighting, texturing and rendering settings, as I now have much more robust hardware to cope with the stresses that I aim to throw at it.

Over the summer I aim to produce some high quality model assets with the assistance of Polycount.com, and maybe even get some exposure in the modelling and animating community.

Project 3!

Here's the brief that I picked:

Character Design, visual style and functionality… Task 3:
Redesign Model and demonstrate 3 functional animated characters From Neil
Gaiman’s Graphic novels that centre around the Sandman character.

Here's what I intend to do this term:
I'm going to look at reinterpreting and designing the three guardians of Dream's castle- The Wyvern, Hyppogriff and Griffin.
I like how I can take reference and inspiration from both classic and contemporary literature and media, and take a path towards more expressive design with creatures rather than modelling more humanoid characters.
I'll also relish the challenge of creating animations and breathing life into these creatures.

Keep up with more frequent updates on my work in progress blog.

And the paddington project is finished!

Here's the video:

And my rational:

“In the style of” gave us the opportunity to extend our creative knowledge in a way that allowed us to come up with novel twists on original ideas, but also aesthetically followed a pre-requisite style.

This presented a number of issues from the offset, since it would be an interesting challenge to create a piece of animation that didn’t just feel as though it were ripping off the original content, and acted instead as a homage rather than a copy.

In order to do this I would need to pick the right IP to reboot in the style that furthered the narrative most effectively.

Primarily I watched each of the available original cartoons for Paddington, TMNT and Roobarb- Immediately I felt that I could draw parallels between the original British version of Paddington, with its cut-out backdrops and charming stop-motion animation, and the desaturated, recycled  style of ‘The Lost Thing’.

I also liked that the characters in this sketch had stylised limb proportions, which I felt could translate well to possible bear concepts.

At first I did a number of facial sketches for Paddington (see my WIP blog) in order to get a large visual reference pool from which to select and adapt an original and exciting concept, after that came the body- which was designed with modelling in mind, or rather with a challenge in mind.

When it came to modelling the bear in Max, I learnt many things through dodging and occasionally falling into pitfalls along the way, for instance I found that using a symmetry modifier on a subdivided object seems to bake in the subdivisions, which is at best frustrating, and at worst an absolute farce when it came to exporting to Mudbox for texturing and details.

Thankfully, I managed to get a model that was workable, and when it came to designing a secondary model for the little old lady afterwards, I breezed it in a fraction of the time and produced a clean, simple model that exported and edited inside mudbox like a dream.

It was also helpful to learn and practice with CAT rigging, again I had a few issues when building the bear, but by the time I got round to modelling the lady, things were much smoother and I had a clear idea of what to do and how, though next time I would like to explore the application of morph targets and see whether they are compatible with CAT rigs.

Yet again I found that rendering is something that should be done with a notebook and checklist at hand, especially if it happens to take place at silly-O’clock in the morning (Gotta get those stills rendered whilst I’m asleep- efficiency!)

I found that the post production knowledge that I’d picked up was very useful, though I had a lot less time available for post that I would’ve liked, due to personal deadlines being somewhat flexed in the run up to the solid deadline, overall I was pleased with the result and can hopefully fully master the art of a comfortable timeline during the next project!

 

The concepting phase has begun for project 2!

Check out my work in progress blog for more frequent updates:

Otherwise, wait/check here until some more substantial renders, bits and bobs turn up! 

Project 1 Rational

The steampunk chess robot project asked us to design, build and animate a Chess robot and its environment in the steampunk visual style, and whilst the brief asked for a limited “set”, I made the decision to use a slightly more versatile street setting, as I felt that an alleyway could feel more industrial and contemporary to the brief.

I took in a number of inspirations, and thankfully steampunk was a theme I was vaguely familiar with already thanks to films such as “9” and “Howl’s moving castle”. Other inspirations included an unusual piece “future forms of life”- David Lance, which featured a strange shuffling biomechanical beast, and somewhat influenced my animation angle regarding my steampunk spider.

During the project I came across a number of challenges and issues, each of which was overcome through problem solving and internet searches. For example, the scale of the set required me to create separate instances in which I could efficiently render separate scenes without having to worry about extra lights and artefacts slowing down the rendering process.

Another technique that I used to maximise productivity was to only render whilst I was asleep, I’d check the first few frames, then when I woke I’d have the full collection of stills from which to make an animation.

However this worked against me at one point as I’d accidentally selected the “perspective” render view, and wasted 4 hours rendering the entire animation from one angle. Thankfully, I learned from this mistake.

Another approach I took to make the scene more cinematic, but avoid overcomplicating the scene for myself, was to only use a single camera, and to use key framing in such a way that to the audience it would seem that the shot had cut to another, separate one.

Similarly to this, I struggled with a certain linking constraint- where a chess piece refused to be unlinked from a hand constraint, so I made the decision to splice it out of the shot at a certain point, and stitch in a copy in its place. This worked well.

One issue that I would like to overcome is the way that I textured my objects, I’d like to be able to map textures onto surface in a way that looks entirely convincing, rather than just adding bump maps and using a simple UVM map modifier. I hope to achieve this by practising with the Unwrap UVM modifier.

Secondly, I believe that despite the cinematographic aspects of my final animation, my use of pacing and timing could use some refinement, I’ll look to address this through practise and exploring other examples to see how they tackle this.

One aspect that I would like to improve on is the way that a character has ‘character’, after seeing other examples I realise that there are certainly ways of effectively adding depth and strength to a character profile, in similar ways to Pixar and Dreamworks.

Overall I am pleased with the outcome, though next time I’d like to aim for completing the project well before deadline in order to add more post-production time to refine and polish the work into another level.

Project 1 completed!

Here are my latest creationa, the steampunk chess robots.

Spider robot introduction shot is done!

I've completed the intro section to my 'Steampunk chess robot' animation, It's currently rendering and the 20 second animation should be on here within an hour.