Project Update: Week 1

SET GOALS:

- This week what i aim to achieve is to finish the character model of my character.

- Learn MEL(Maya embedded language) Syntax

- Research images of animals such as lions and apes to help aid my geometry study.













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SEMESTER 2: DIGITAL ARTS PROJECT 2

The Project: The Beast

I am going to be producing an Technical animation demo reel. So what this consist of is the setting up of a particular character in 3d space. I am aiming to create believable deformations and advance character controls and advance joint setup chains for the character.

Final concepts. Any comments or crits is welcomed.

Karbala 01: First Pass

PSYG LOGO

karbala concept sketch

PSYG CONCEPT

PROJECT PROPOSAL

Project 2: PART 1

* Develop a character design thoroughly exploring as much as possible.

* Also to take care in making sure that all attributes are anatomically correct.

* Develop some concept art as well as some character sheets.

Character Concepts

Here are some of the character concepts I have developed. I think I will be developing the pink beast creature as a character for 3D.

Concept sketches

-The Beast Kingdom-


Here are some concept sketches of characters. I'm primarily trying to focus just on the Beast Kingdom itself.

RESEARCH

Enviroment:
Some environments how I could envisage the different kingdoms for the different races.





Characters: Here are some character inspiration art that I've been looking at. Understanding armour detail was what I was really interested in. Also the design of facial and body structure I tried to study.

The Story

Over the past 2 weeks I've been thinking up of a story for this project. I had big influence from the game "Warcraft 3 Dota map" after many hours of playing it. So here is the quick overview of the story:

There once was a world ruled over by 4 kingdoms. The Beast Kingdom, The Vampiric Kingdom, The Human Kingdom and the Sky Kingdom. In ages past, wars erupted between the (land) kingdoms over the territories of their rule. Many centuries past before a treaty was drawn up by the Sky Kingdom to stop the senseless wars between rival kingdoms. There was an age of peace, and everyone lived happily for a period of time.

However food and resources became scarce for some. The Vampiric Kingdom was not prospering because of their disregard to maintaining their kingdom properly. So they devised a plan to take over other kingdoms and their resources. They sent clans under their alliance out to start a war between the kingdom of the beast and the kingdom of the humans. This is so they may attack both the kingdoms later on when they are weak. Their plan was to take over the entire world.

Thats the brief story without going into to many details.

I will update the story a little bit later on in the future.

PIXAR ANIMATOR - ANDREW GORDON -

Over the weekends I attended an animation workshop ran by autodesk. The tutor was Andrew Gordons and it was inspiring to hear and learn from his experiences as an animator in the industry. What was really weird was that it was actually held at Monash Caulfield!

If many of you don't know Mr Gordon he's the animator that animated mike in "Monsters Inc". He's also done animation in "the incredibles"(edna mode) "ratoutoulli"(i think thats how its spelt). Currently he is working on Toy Story 3.

Alot of useful tips have been given to us students and i feel very empowered!

So bring on the work hahaaa

Reference

Character Sketches

The Idea:

I want to develop a character that tells a story visually from what he looks like. This character will also be put into a short animation for the future projects for MMD.

PROJECT 2: SELF DRIVEN PROJECT

This project will be a 3D based project. It will involve:

- Character design
- Modelling
- Rigging
- Cloth effects
- Abit of animation
- Mel Scripting in Maya

Goals:

- I will attempt to create a very proficient and advance rig for this project.

- Create a clean and efficient(high poly/low poly)model that could be used in game

Let the sleepless nights begin!

CHARACTER DESIGNS

SOUND

Sound was a very important part in the production and was one of the hardest part. I was lucky to stumble upon a very good website called incompetech.com created by Kevin Macleod who is a very very talented musician. His music was an integral part of my animation and the good thing about it is, everything is royalty free! Other sound effects were taken from Ghibli Studio's, "Howl's Moving Castle" from the castle sounds at the start of the movie. The rest of the sound effects were found on the internet and some I created myself.

ANIMATION WORKFLOW AND POST PRODUCTION

ANIMATION

I done my animations using PHOTOSHOP CS3's animation palette. It is all frame by frame and I did not use any reference apart from studying my own movements. I was trying to apply the principles of animations such as squash and stretch and also arcs.

My basic work flow for creating the animations:

- Blocking animation
- Rough over of animation with character
- Go over it and try and improve the animation by adding more frames
- Once I am satisfied with the line work, I would block colour every single frame and then go over it with the highlights.

It became a very tedious task coloring in the frames for the animations and was very time consuming.

POST PRODUCTION

In post production I added environmental effects such as smoke and video motion distortion. For the smoke I created it using the simulation particle system called "Particle playground" in After Effects.

Other effects include the video distortion from a plug-in I downloaded called "delirium" by DigiEffects.

Camera work was also done in After Effects.

PRODUCTION PROCCESS: BACKGROUNDS

Pre-production: Creating backgrounds

I used a Wacom intuos 3 tablet for all my drawings. All objects and graphics created in my animation were created in Photoshop CS3 using a digital tablet. All the line work are produced before a block-colouring and shading and highlighting. Note: I did not use any reference pictures for any of my backgrounds. As I already had my storyboard blocked out, I just had to expand the scene and add more detail to it. Here are some of the images:

STYLES AND RESEARCH

STYLES AND RESEARCH

Well I have to say that I am a big fan of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli's animations and work. So at first I wanted to develop something similar to the clean and crisp animation as to be able to be compared to them. But then I realized that it was much harder than I thought it would be.

I had other influences from a Korean animated Movie called "Achi and Ssipak". They had a very different way of animating and I quite liked how they did all their effects and stuff.

Some books that I researched on included Ben Caldwell's, "Action Cartooning" which as a very good book on drawing anatomy and cartoon figure.

Also Richard Williams, " The Animator Survival Kit" which was what I try to refer to when animating my character.