Update

Been super busy so havent had much time to blog but here is a quick update of some things Ive been working on

Diederich textured

Lighting Tests

Quick Colour Test

Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.

Catch Up Time

Ok so things have gotten really busy round here, I now have a team working for me and its taken some time to get everone organised so they have all they need to do what I need. Its going to be great having some extra help, although at has been a bit of a slow start and not as much has been done as I would of liked. I undersatand they have had there own work to do but I just hope things will get better as time is running out. Ok so trying to think what I have been doing since my last post. Well I have added some materials t the set that I built, its nothing fancy just a few bumps and specs just to hopefully get it to react to the lighting the way it should. I havent really been able to completley test it against the lights but I have one shot that kinda shows a comparison.

No Material
With Material

This is a shot that emma lit and I really like it, she has captured that dark eeriness that I wanted and i think will be really helpfull when seeting up the base light for my shots. I have also moved onto animation which has been really great to get started on that, things seem to be going smoothly in that area haven had any problems wit my rigs which is great, did have to tweak my ncloth slightly but that suprisingly hasnt given me much problems yet. So one problem I do have when it comes to animating is spending way too much time on a shot I have the habit to keep tweaking things to try get it perfect and then someone will mention something thats probably really minute and Ill then spend ages trying to fix it. So my aim for easter is to not do that. I have moved on to another shot which I really didnt spend much time on so hopefully I can keep that up. It will be quite nic to have this easter break as I will be able to spend all my time animating with no distractions (hopefully) which will help me get things done sooner. Again I am a little worried about my helpers, they said they are fine to work over easter but I just hope they will be able to get the shots that I gave them done before we get back. They have begun animating whihc is great but I havent seen a completed shot yet whihc is a bit of a worry. Well heres my animation.

Another thing i have been trying to complete is the texturing of my characters. I have been working on rolley and he is pretty much done now. I am happy with how he is looking but I kinda feel I could get him looking better but i dont really have too much time to spend. I did use mudbox on his face just to break up the spec but Im starting to thing that it may be quicker and easier just to do bumps from now on. I dont really want much detail so mudbox might not be the best route for me. I am really happy with how his skin came out, used mental reays skin shader for this and its really made such a difference, its taken away thet plastic look that you can sometimes get with cgi characters and Im really happy with it. I am also happy with the eyes and how they have turned out. I spend quite a bit of time trying to get them right as they say the eyes are the most important thing and that where everyone looks. I decided to create a fake specular high light which I can control as i found thet there was before when using a blin to achieve it there was alot of glare and unwanted reflection. And now I have done one I can use the same eyes on the rest of the chracters and just change the colour.

ok well I need to get back to work I want to try get all my charcters textures done so that is out of the way and I can soley concentrate on the animation. Peace out :)

Blockthrough and Stuff

So since my last post i have finished off my final character which is timmy's spider. I am happy with the look and the rigging all went fine. It was actually was a lot easier to rig than what I was expecting, and weighting was a dream. Its not a very advance rig but I think has everything I need in order to animate. It is going to be a challenge animating an eight legged creature, but look forward to it.

Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.

I have been working on a few props, nothing special just a few extra items I need for animation. I have just modelled them at this stage and have a few more to do. Also just have a image to help work out the scale of items.











The main thing I have been working on this week is my blockthrough. This has taken me a week to complete and i am still working on timing but heres the rough version.

BlockThrough from cherie on Vimeo.

I didnt really have any problems but did find a few problems that I had to keep in mind or work around. I think this is really going to help me get rid of any problems I may have in the future. This is also going to be a big help on timing and getting my shots worked out.

This is going to be a long one

Ok so havent writen in a long time, been really busy, you know the story. Anyway just been working away on this trying to keep up with my schedule. Im feeling quite happy with what I have got done so far and after going through my schedule with Andy Im feeling confident I can get it all done on time.

Ok so since my last post I have Finished modelling and pretty much finished rigging my characters. So modelling went fine seem to get through it quick enough and no problems really. Here are some turn arounds of my characters

Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.

Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.

Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.

Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.

Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.

Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.

Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.

Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.

So happy with them, was a bit worried about what Timmy was looking like but once I got his hair on he looked alot better and I know once he is textured he will look closer to what Iwant. The real problem I had was rigging as usual. There is just so much that can go wrong with it.The thing is I want to be able to create some really bouncy cartoony animation and so wanted to put some stretchy limbs into my characters which i have never done before. I started out reffering to one of the Gnomon rigging tutorials which is great if you have a coplex character but really wasnt necessary for my cartoony ones. He also used like a trillian bones for some reason which ended up making problems in end. I couldnt get the stretch to work correctly, everytime I would try and stretch the arm or leg it would just grow out in a weird way. Anyway I decided to scrap that technique and found a cartoon rigging tutorial by Digital Tutors which was so much simpler. He used just one bone chain for the arms and legs and used expressions to great the stretch. Everything work the way it was meant to. So once I got into rigging the characters it really didnt take too long to get them rigged. I had waisted so much time with my last rig trying to work out what the problem was it was really nice to speed through the rest of the rigs with everything going right. Anyway got them rigged up and really happy with how they moved. it also isnt to much of a complicated rig so is going to good when it comes to animating which Im really looking forward to now. Heres some more pics.

Ok so next was painting the weights, now I have had the oppertunity to do this on several of my rigs before so I was feeling confident that I wouldnt have a problem. It such an annoying tedious job I just kinda pushed through it as fast as I could. Managed get all the weights painted in a week. It one rewarding thing about it though is when you start to see youre characters move the way they are meant to, they really start to come to life.

So next thing were the blend shapes which again didnt have much problem but its just such a long process especially when you have four characters. I decided that I would do six expression for each character and that would hopefully give me enough expressions when I blend between them. I did see a thing online where a guy show that six facial expressions plus the neutral would give loads of expression when blended together. So that what I ahve done and hopefully its all I am going to need. looking back at more storyboard it does seem I have all the expressions I need. I also rigged the face at this point too. Setting up the jaw controls, the blinking eyes and eybrow tweaks. All together this took me just over a week. I did have a few very small problems with the cluster and the blrndshapes but that was just because the input order was the wrong way round so easy fix.

Ok so i ahve my charcters all rigged and modelled, but there are a few things I am still working on. I decided that for the fat kid and the old lady i wanted to use maya muscle to add a jiggle to there flabby bits. thsi was really easy and Im quite happy with the results. I think this will help in adding that little bit more of life to them. Here are the results.

Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.

Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.

Untitled from cherie on Vimeo.

but back to things I still need to do. I wasnt sure about using ncloth in my animation because I know that it can sometimes be such a pain and cause problems but when weighting Timmy's shirt and the old lady's skirt I couldnt get it to move the way I wanted. so it does seem I am going to have to use ncloth did some research and found a way i can just do it to the bottom of the geometry and not the whole thing so hopefully this will make it a bit easier. I am also still working on the hair. at the begining I wasnt too sure waht way i was going to do the hair. I designed my charcaters with quite stylized hair and I really didnt want to go put some realistic hair on them because I think it would just look weird and It seems like a hard thing to get right. i see so many student animations which have tried to use maya hair and failed. So the next idea was to use polygon planes with an alpha channel for the hair. Which seems like a great fast way to make hair but I dont think I would be able to get the stylized look that i want with that technique I did use this for my eyebrows though. Anyway decided to just model the hair as that way I could get the look I wanted. i am a bit woried what it will look like once textured so may end up using a mixture of plane as well will have see.

Ok one thing I also have finished is my animatic finally. i ended up loosing the one I did before as storyboard pro didnt want to read my file, not sure why might be because I started it on the trial version. anyway spent a day rediong that and then went through the timing with Andy and happy with how it is looking. Things seem to flow quite well and I think it gets the story across anyway really looking forward to begining the animation not long to go now.

Catch Up

Ok so been a while since my last posting, just been really busy with all the work I have on. So since my last post I have finished my story board and put it into animatic form. Still playing around with the timing on the animatic but so far so good really.

Some days I really like my project and others I think its a pile of crap, but today is a good day and I am really happy with whats Ive done so far. I thinks my story has potential to have some funny skits as well as some more emotional scenes which I really like. I think its going to give me some great challenges in terms animation. Main worry right now is not getting all my rigging and modelling done by the end of Dec which means it may run into my animation time which I really dont want to happen. Im trying to give myself as much time as possible to animate as this is the area I never have enough time on and since I would like to get into animation as a career I really need to spend alot of time on it getting it perfect. hopefully. So I have been pushing on with modeling and texturing I have basically finished my house and most props, though I still need to spend some time creating the materials. So far I am pretty happy with it there are some areas which need a bit more work and I would really like to take it into mudbox to add some finer details. But unfortunatley I have fallen behind a few days due to some work I had to do on the presentation we had so I am going to push on with my characters and try make up some time and come back to my house a bit later. It would also be good to get away from it for a while and work on something new.

Um, so ja we had a presentation the other day which wasnt great, cant stand talking infront of tons of people but thats over which is great. The panel seemed to quite like my work but I did get a comment about my characters not having noses which kinda made me think maybe they should have noses, but then again Im happy the way they look and I did choose not to have noses as my style choice, I guess, so nah wont change it now. So for the presentation we did have to create a wow image which I chose to be just a combination of all my previous concept work as I really didnt have time to paint another one. So it did turn out kinda nice, I did also spend some time creating my title for it. I had a look at some feature film titles like up, finding nemo, and monsters inc (im a pixar fan!) and they all seems to try and incorporate the essence of the animation into their title which is what I decided to try and do. Now im no graphics artist, but i do kinda like what I ended up with which you can see on the wow picture here.

Ok so thats really all Ive been up to latley will try keep my post a bit more regular from now but you know how it is, work just takes over your life.

Further Pre-Production

So recently watched Pixar's "Up" and it was amazing, the amount of detail they put into their films is really inspiring. I love the entire look of the film, the textures are so detailed and the animation is always believable. The characters are all so lovable and I love their sense of humour. It has really pushed me to into wanting to create some great textures for my own animation.



Well back to my work. Ive been working on some background paintings which have turned out quite nice. I never really paint on photoshop and I am kinda pleased with what I have produced. I will only be using one background which is the main hall one for the final animation as my story board has been edited so wont be needing the porch. The hall way is pretty much how I would like it I could do a bit more work tweaking the lighting and colours a bit more but I think it will be better make a move and start creating the actual models as I don't want to fall behind schedule. I have also just done a Ariel plan of the background to work from in Maya. I do want to do one more piece of art to show the other side of this room, even though there wont be much there I think it will help to make sure everything is planned out.





This week I have also created a schedule which doesn't look as daunting as I thought it would but that may change as hings progress, but I'm basically aiming to get all modeling texturing and rigging done for the end of Dec so I can move straight into animation in Jan. I would like to have as much time as possible to concentrate on animation as in previous productions I have always ran out of time here and have had to rush it just to get it finished. I have also taken some better photos of my model so will up load them here. Other than that I have continued to work on my storyboard, I got a chance to talk to Derek out new lecturer who did give me some great help so just tweaking it again. I have also cut out a few shots so I have saved on quite a bit of work there.