The Talking Dog Project

Ok so for the talking dog project I have decided to work on the knight’s script. I’m happy that we are working on this script as it was my first choice, and I think we can really make it quite funny and original. The group consists of Pete, Justin, Adam, Sean, and Toni, I’m really happy with the group as they all tend to work hard when they are given something and we all get along pretty well. Anyway, the first job on the project was to just get some idea and concepts down. Even though I wasn’t going to be part of the pre-production we all just drew up some idea to show how we all visualized the knights to look like. Here are some designs I did for that:

Ok next thing we really needed to hurry up and get modelling as we have quite a tight schedule especially as the production run over the Easter holidays. So as soon as Justin finished designing the knights I got to modelling. I did quite enjoy modelling from someone else’s designs, it’s quite a nice challenge to see if you can get the model looking like what they designed on paper, as things always seem to look quite different once they are in 3D. Anyway I never had any problems with the modelling, and enjoyed doing it quite a bit. What I decided to do was model a basic knight’s body and then just add the different details to create 3 knights from the same basic body. Justin designed them this way to make the work load a little easier. Same thing happened with the small knights that come out of the armoured knight; I made the blue knight and just altered it to create the red knight. So far I haven’t had any problems or anything I would do different really, I am happy with the designs and the way the models turned out. The only problem we have now is time, I really need to rush on and get these things rigged so we can start animation ASAP. We were meant to get them rigged by last week but I just didn’t have enough time. Adam is busy modelling the squires which are looking really great and I think he is also ready to rig at this point and Sean was creating all the props which I believe are almost done too. Justin has finished the animatic so we really aren’t too far behind it’s just with the Easter holidays it’s going to be hard to keep up the momentum. Well that’s all I have to say for now really and here’s the models so far:

The Maya Modelling Project

Ok so for this we had to take a photo of a street and then try and accurately model it in Maya. This was a good project to try out as you don’t really realise how much harder it is to model things to scale from a photo as opposed to just modelling something from your own design. I think I did reasonable well on this although I should have spent more time on it. I just felt that I needed to concentrate more on my animation. A thing I need to improve is naming things properly as well as grouping things in a more organised way. I plan on being a lot more organised on my next project as it can save you so much time in the future, but ja over all a good enough project.

Character Animation

Ok so the character animation project was a real challenging one which I really enjoyed. Animation is a field which I would really like to get into so it was great having a chance to focus on portraying character through an animation. We also had to do some lip syncing which is something I never done in 3d before so I really looked forward to giving it a try. The first thing I attempted to animate was my character skipping towards an oven. The character I want to get across was that of a child so I did want to try and portray him as being 0energetic and full of fun. The skip was a lot harder than I thought and I struggled to get it looking fluid and bouncy. I’m not too sure if it was due to the angle that I was looking at it from, but it just didn’t work. The next part the character would look realise there was something in the oven, look hungry, check the time and realise the food was ready and get the tray out the oven. This piece didn’t work either. I think the real problem was that there were too many emotions put in a small amount of time which really wasn’t realistic or needed. This is something I need to work on in the future, I tend to try put too much into my animation where using less would look make it more believable and a lot smoother. Next the character walks over to the oven and gets out the tray, reacts to the food being nasty and then sighs and walks off saying “I may as well go back to making noodles”. I think this part of my animation worked a lot better and the lip syncing even though not that visible seemed to work. The weird thing is that I spent a lot less time on the end bit than the begging and it seemed to work a lot more. Overall I really enjoyed the exercise and need to push myself more to do more character animation. I need to concentrate on second reaction animation and need to act out and time what I am animating to get better timing and more believable actions.