Change of plans Mr Man.

Talked to another tutor today who helped me to refine my concept and gave me some very good ideas. Which now means I'll have to redraw my storyboard which is very annoying due to not having much time left but never mind.

Going to change the environment to a swamp. Instead of the inanimate object which inspires my character being a magnet it's now going to be a spinning top.

As he gets faster he has good balance and as he gets slower he losses his balance more. He's going to be a Polaroid and his meaning in life is to capture important things. He will print Polaroids and lay them on the water to navigate the scene. He sees something in the distance that he must capture. Making his way across the swamp, loosing balance and getting excited he arrives to find it was just a silhouette of something else which then falls down in the wind. Frustrated he turns back to find he's ran out of film and all the photographs  in the water are floating away. He stamps his foot in frustration and falls into the swamp.

Environment Ideas:

Texture Time

Texturing my model now. Really happy with the paint peeling, rust look on his body and face like an old rusted can (my material)

Progress Man

 Modelling the eye

   
He's almost done and ready for texturing. Yay!

Even trying to model the blindfold which is hard. I'm so proud I figured out how to make the rope for his arm, so happy. 

It's Modelling Time!

Oops, that took too long.

Yeah.... Why did I colour this? Yes it looks much better now but this took me so many hours and now I'm behind with everything else for this project which I also want to be a high standard. I'm so clever. Trust me to do this the hard way.

Anyway, here is my long, colourful storyboard. I've added depth of field by using bokeh and blur on photoshop. I coloured this using my tablet. You can see I've added the feature of eyebrows here.

Storyboard ink drawings.

Drew this with ink on paper and have scanned them in. Now to colour them on photoshop....

Rough sketch/plan for storyboard

A confusing tale

Okay, so I contacted another tutor about my ideas and work and he actually thinks that my original character sticks to the brief more and looks good artistically. His advice was to focus on the magnetic for movement which I really like. He suggested doing something other than legs. I really want to learn how to rig legs properly though as it's an important part of animation in Maya. I also think they look good. I'm thinking I will keep their appearance how they are BUT make him walk magnetically. So he must stick out his leg and it is pulled to the magnetic field. Therefore, his way of movement is not what you would originally expect.

Material: Old Tin Can
Movement: Magnetic
Meaning: Camera

This is what I'm thinking so far. I've brought camera back into my idea as I think a good meaning for him would be to capture important moments and memories.

I spent hours trying to sketch and plan a woodland/metal type of creature. Way too difficult, my brain was just frozen. Everything I could think of would be far too complicated to model in Maya and also take a long rendering time.
Here are some sketches and notes to prove I did stress and freak out over it:
(So yes, it's a big relief I may be able to stick to my original concept which I really like. I still want to combine Steven's really good advice though s I can see his point)

So in Conclusion: It's very confusing when tutors are giving you completely opposite opinions. One telling me to almost scrap my idea while the other says it's actually more fitted to the brief. As re-sketching my concept wasn't working for me and I didn't feel confident with the new idea I will stick to my original concept and improve it.

The Plan

• Rough first sketch of my storyboard (18 scene minimum) 
• Edit and improve it
• Scan in computer
• Redraw nicely in Photoshop - including colour ect. (Hopefully I get time for this)
• Begin to model my character
  
  After this, all that is left:
•  3x Images/sketches of character in motion
• Paragraph describing the origin of the character and personality.
•  3x Sketches, renders or photographs of character’s environment.
• Turntable animation of modelled and textured character. (15 seconds maximum)
  
  And I already have the Orthographic (side, front) images/sketches of character, which is one thing done, phew. 

Tutor Feedback

Presented my concept in class today and got tutor feedback. Need to redo my entire character pretty much :( A bit disheartening but never mind, I want the best character possible so if that's what it takes I'm fine with that. The problem is that my character is too literal. I personally like that, as I'm really over abstract briefs and was looking forward to the fact that this one could be more realistic in a sense. But I think I can still achieve that by having a very unique character.


Here are some notes I write in my sketch book. I'll type them  onto my blog:

TUTOR FEEDBACK AND MY THOUGHTS/IDEAS
 - Rather than a 'robot', an organic character covered in scraps of metal which have been collected over time
 - Possibly a woodland type of creature.
 - Rather than seeing its reflection in the mirror it could see its reflection in water.
 - It tries to touch itself in the water and then pollutes it. Possibly oil leak or something.
 - Lives in an old, abandoned town by the water.
 - Skin or fur underneath the metal
 - Metal possibly used as protection (armor)
 - Can see the skin/fur in places underneath the metal
 - Character picks up piece of metal and puts it on himself - which shows why he has so much metal on himself.

Ideas:

Material: Old tin can
Movement: Magnetic? Spring for a bouncy like walk
Meaning: An object that represents loneliness or a longing to find a companion? Maybe look at organic forms and organs to find something that has a need to search for something else.

Final Concept for Presentation. Rust.

So this is what I'll be presenting tomorrow as my progress so far. This version is with rust! I think the old, aging paint and metal really adds to the character. You can see his goggles, rope for an arm and long lens eye. He's a very cool little guy. Will be interesting getting feed back on him. Hopefully I don't have to completely change his appearance at all as I really like his long. However, I want to produce an amazing animation so am completely open to constructive advice.

Shaded Concept

Cool, I'm happy with the shading done in Photoshop. Now to add the rust detail.

Blocked in Colours

I've blocked in the basic colours of the robot. I now need to do the shading. I could still work off of this simple sketch in Maya so far.

Basic Line Work

Basic Line work. I'm in the process of blocking in the basic colours. I think I may just use these black and white versions for importing into Maya for modelling as they're very simple and easy to follow. Colour can make the shapes seem a little more confusing sometimes.

Sketches

Just really rough sketching for ideas. More for my benefit for when putting into Photoshop to draw over than for my blog. Thought I better show my progress though - even if it's kind of rough. Currently drawing over  them on Photoshop in the T shape so I can import them into Maya to start modelling my character. He's looking pretty cute so far. Just trying to figure out colour and sort out proportions. 

Assignment 2A - Inspiration Machinarium

For my first project I want my character to be a robot type of character. His environment will be in the forest where he'll be really out of place as his material is metal. He will be lonely. So far this is my idea....

Material: Metal
Motion: Camera Lens
Meaning: Lonely - to find a friend.

Thought - Taking inspiration from Machinarium the game for the home of my character. It will be in the forest, old, out of place and made of rusty scraps and junk but very little and cozy. This would further emphasize the characters lonely life.
The film wouldn't be set in the characters home, but may begin there as the character leaves his house and wanders aimlessly into the forest. This would just help to show how isolated the character is. He also is old, rusted, very tiny in size and has a rope for an arm which swings around as he walks because he has not control over it. He looks like an orphan robot.
He would then find an old, jagged mirror in the forest leaning against a tree. He sees his reflection as another being like children, gorillas and kittens often do. He hopes to have found a friend. He has a humorous interaction with his new friend in the mirror. Using his lens eye to zoom in and take photos of his 'friend' and using a flash - the camera view can be through the characters lens as he wobbles around trying to focus in on the character (depth of field.) 
The character then gets a little too excited and begins to try and touch his friend (the mirror) but then smashes his hand through the mirror. At first the mirror cracks, there's a long pause and the robot character looks worried, then the mirror shatters to the ground into many tiny pieces. The character is very sad and again finds himself lonely.

That is as far as I've gotten with the narrative. I have many different options for the ending such as

 - he finds his reflection in something else he owns, happy his friend has returned

 - He finds a robot friend

 - A sad ending where he is left lonely

I want the music to be perhaps piano or orchestral but happy and sweet and perfectly in time with his different movements. He won't talk (he has no mouth) so the music needs to speak for him.

Currently sketching for his character. Needs to check the narrative over with the tutors. It needs improvement and development but I want some feed back first.

Inspiration from: http://machinarium.net/demo/
 - You can play the demo for free to get a feel for what I'm trying to achieve.

The Final Animation

My final project on youtube. Watch in HD.

Worked on music and sounds a lot. Experimented with using mechanical sounds but it made it seem tacky so I stuck to a music track which I feel really creates an airy atmosphere which I would imagine would match with Salvador Dali's work.

My Poster with renders.

Pretty Renders

 I noticed in my animation that the poison water does swish around in the glass tube. I'm really happy about this! I knew it was supposed to but thought Mental Way may have stopped it from doing this. It's a very subtle detail but I like it.

Did these to renders especially for the poster. I have put on all good settings such as Anti Aliasing set to 3, Global Illumination, Ambient Occlusion ect. I could do this for these two renders but not mu entire animation as it would take too long to render out. For my next project, I decided I will definitely use higher settings as I have for these two renders as they look quite amazing compared to a render without these settings. I will just make sure I have a good solid week set purely for over night rendering. I could render out a scene/camera angle each night on one of the macs (or a few of them) and quickly grab them in the mornings.

I also feel more confident about rigging now which will really help me with the next project. Also I made a fairly complicated model in this animation, considering the brief was very abstract and most people just modeled morphing spheres (they still look awesome) which I feel will help me with creating the character for project 2. I would like to experiment with Mud Box in adding detail to a character.

Render dramas

I've been experiencing a lot of stress when it comes to rendering my animation....

Including doing renders and then having the computer accidently delete them and being unable to recover as I replaced the file by mistake. Oops.

This render has:

-Raytracing
-Global Illumination

-Ambient Occlusion

This render has:

-Raytracing
-Global Illumination

-Ambient Occlusion

-Anti Aliasing set to  3

The Anti Aliasing made a huge difference in smoothing out the jagged edges. However all of these settings take too long to render and I had to turn them off for my animations.

The more grass in a scene- the longer it took to render. I tried to set up most of my cameras so it wouldn't show to much grass in a scene. However I couldn't completely avoid this for some scenes. 

The physical sun and sky is a mental ray setting. I was having huge render problems. 7 minutes or more per frame. Ridiculous. There was no way I was going to be able to render in time. I thought it was the grass that was slowing me down but I was unwilling to part with it. I then figured out the the physical sun and sky was what was slowing my rendering times so much. I turned them off and had a huge improvement in comparison. Some scenes with a lot of grass showing still had very long render times.

I experimented with using noise as a blend tool to create a patchy effect. 

My model walks with the rigged legs - although not perfectly. I was running out of time to keep fiddling with my model - I had already wastes a lot of time rigging it and then soon after animating it. So the feet slide a little as it moves. I think it's fine however as the models feet are hidden by the grass and it's not hugely obvious  To do a a good rigged animation I think you need more time to study movements and have a good play with how you want the model to move. I just did very basic movement.

I was just playing with transferring paint effects to polys and the physical sun and sky system on mental way here.

Now to put all of my renders onto After Effects. Although I've rendered more frames than I need and will have to sort through them. Better to have too many than not enough which I was concerned about with my previous slow rendering time. But very pleased with the now faster renders.

I've been looking at music/sound for a while now. I will edit the track today also.