26/05/2011 - 22 Days Left

After getting some feedback from the group in uni I adjusted the camera to give more impact as the camera before hand was a mid shot lacking impact, where as the new camera was is an over the shoulder shot which helps the focus towards the marmot. I also got feedback about the animation saying that it needed to be more subtle and that i should take out the animation where he placed his hand on his leg as it was too much for the simplicity we wanted.

Also Helped Dave neaten up the graph editor as it was quite daunting to look while helping tweak his animation.

Before editing the graph

After editing the graph

Went up to the Prototyping in uni in the afternoon to find out about getting our characters printed in 3D for our degree show, so some of my time is going to be taken of by preping the files for the printer.

24/05/2011 - 3 Weeks Left

At this point I am still waiting on animators to finish give me a finessed scene to render, in the mean time i have been working on some promotional shots for the degree show as well as working on the animation for the final after credit shot of the marmot being cooked. i have been having a few issues as our tutor told us to not have a too detailed model of the marmot on the spit as it could be seen as a bit crude but when taking out some of the detail the marmot was losing too much character and not looking right. i decided to leave a bit more detail in there and have smoke and fire overlaid in the compositing stage.

Here is a screen shot of the final scene set up, you can see that the marmot has a small level of detail to which will hopefully be more subtle once I have comped FX into the scene

 While working on the animation for this scene I am trying to keep the graph editor as neat as possible, as although not being an animator I know that the graph editor is one of the most useful tools. If i had the time I would like to learn to animate stepped but I fit it in with everything else I have.

Here is a Playblast of the animation so far, I am struggling as the animation has to be subtle but I'm going to see the tutor on thursday so i should be able to get some help

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Here you can see the promotional render I am working on, its going to be a simple environmentwith the 2 characters mid run added in later.

Rendering 6

Here you can see the the first full quality test that we had for our this was a simple Ambient Occlusion render with a colour matte underneath it.

Simple Render Style



Below you can see 3 renders I did for the environment with textures applied but it turned out that Dave preferred the simple style but it was good for development as we were really beginning to see how the film good look.

Texture Render Test 1



Texture Render Reduced Parper Bleed Through



Mountain Colour Depth and Improved Texture

Scene Modeling 2

Scene Modeling 1

Animatic Work

Animatic First Draft

Animatic Short Final Version

Rendering 5 and Secondary Animation

 This video is one of the render pieces where I was trying to match one of Dave's concepts this was a simple matter of using the layer as an alpha channel and using this as a silhouette. This was also a shot where you can see some of the secondary animation that I have been working on.

Silhouette concept match



Below is one of the very first renders that I did which showed a good representation of what the final film should look like.

Beaty Shot For Pitch



This Render was also in preparation for the 2nd term pitch that we had to do. Dave and I decided that I could use this opportunity to practice my editing techniques to create a Making Of Snatched film.

Hut Modeling

Originally this hut was modelled by dean in our group but when I got got round to using his it so that I could start putting the sets together I had a few issue. the first was that it had a 9 sided polygon and we have always been told to have no more then a 4 sided in a model although this was fairly simple to fix, after letting dean know that I was going make some adjustments to the model. I started to fix it by using the split polygon tool, which divides the polygon between 2 selected points. This was all simple and I very quickly had a tidy looking model, all it needed now was some small adjustments to the vertexes to make it look tidier. Once I moved the first vertex it turned out there was another under it, from this I also found out there was a polygon under another and it appeared this happened all over the model. After talking to the director and dean it turned out it was going to be quicker for me to rebuild the model.

I started the modelling of the hut by creating a cylinder and scaling it on the X and Z axis but not the Y until the cylinder looked the right dimension. In the picture above you can see where began extruding sections of the cylinder until I got the right look for the hut. I finished the hut in about half an hour but unfortunately the director wasn't to happy with the design so I ended up remaking the model although this didn't bother me as I enjoy modeling anyway.

You can see above see one of the huts that I made but the director want it to feel more like it was a tent and the material was hanging over a frame.

Here you can see the 3 iterations of the hut (from left to right) Deans original, My First attempt and then the final which made the film.

Above you can see a ambient occlusion render of the final model used in the film

Rendering 4

Swing Test



Swing Test Drawn

Man Modelling (Problem Solving)

Originally the Character of the mongol was going to be modeled by another student on the course not a member of my team but the modelling of he character was so hi-res that our rigger was having issue when it came to the rigging it. The character was also modeled with no legs under the coat that created a lot of issues once the rigging began. it was at this point that i said to the rigger did she want me to create a character model over the weekend to see if the rigging would be easier. After showing the model to the rigger she decided it would be easier to use my model but I had to get the director to okay it first. The director loved the model it was beginning to look more like the original concept.

Here you can see the characters development stages, this is an images just showing the beginning stages of the body before the head was added and the director gave me his input on the model. I know that at this stage there was a lot to be adjusted such as proportions of the body and making him more stylised.

At this point I had been given a fair amount of input