So this week was the week of the presentation and so it consumed practically all of my time. I created a video to present my idea to the panel and everyone and it was quite a time consuming process, but i'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Here's the vid firstly:
Third Year Digital Animation Project Pitch from Jacob Golding on Vimeo.
Please ignore the horrible writing (I hate writing!), and the cheesiness which was partially intended. It was quite fun getting back into Premiere. Since it's a fairly easy piece of software to get into and it's always fun learning/relearning stuff. Managed to make some fairly quick but nice looking animations for the transitions of the pictures and stuff which I think helps the style of the characters and everything as a whole. The music helps a lot too, if you're wondering it's Helix Nebula by a band called Anamanaguchi. Good tune. Er.. yeah, anyway. Did the pitch, shitting myself for the initial introduction thing which I mumbled my way through nervously, played the vid then answered some questions in a much more relaxed manner for whatever reason.
The criticism that I got back was mainly to do with the depth of the story. I think I always have, hopefully not always will, have had this problem with creating really interesting stories. If i'm honest I like art for art's sake, and I like to feel the story in the art... but I guess this doesn't cut it when you're pitching stories to people. But that's not my area anyway, i'm just the art guy. Whatever, i'm not making enough sense for this to be worth writing about. It was alright though, and while the week is gone for little reward, i'm happy with the little vid that I produced, and having all the characters together on the screen made me at least feel like i'd done a fair bit of work these past few weeks/months. Especially considering my (lack of) speed.
On to the MODELING!
I think I might've spent Monday from last week working on the model before the rest of the time was eaten by the pitch. Not entirely sure what I worked on at that time, and i'm sad that I didn't fulfil my hopes that I would have a finished model by this time, but I can show what I have, and it's far more impressive than an eyeball and whatever! Anyway, this is my progress:
There are some nice wireframes for all of you that care, too (NOONE!).
Still have a lot of work to do, hands will probably be a pain, and i have the legs and that, and also I want to rework the topology in the face and shoulders because I want these really to be stellar, how they look and how they animate. The area i'm most concerned with is the shoulders at the minute, so i'll show you some of the research that i've been carrying out recently, which is surprisingly a fair bit and looks quite neat now that i've put some pictures together. Here we go:
Okay this is what I've got with the model in it's current stages. I did a little test because of the problems that i've come up against in the past (how pro is that? ;)). Definitely not happy with the deformation at this point, but a big factor is the fact that these arms won't even be seen - they'll be hid the entire time underneath sleeves. The only reason i'm modeling this much is because it may be needed to collide with the n cloth on the sleeves if andy ever gets around to putting it in. SO these may actually be fine, but in the sake of learning i'm going to try to make them really nice anyway. It'll benefit me when I come to creating the rest of my characters anyway. I was a bit confused as to how to topologise it for maximum goodness, so I did some research...
This is a highly accomplished (i think) rig in it's nubile stages from the gnomon people. Something I noticed here, when compared to my model, even this guy, in a slightly further stage of rigging than my guy, he still gets the deformation on the top of the shoulder. This means I'm probably on the right track, i just need to tweak, and of course, a very large stage of the rigging process - paint the weights well. Also i believe this model in it's completed stage uses blendshapes on the shoulders, this is something i've little knowledge in... anyway, i digress.
These images are from this amazing tutorial on the area. I'd forgotten about this place until Georg reminded me, and actually i'm always coming back to this particular one. It's really great. So here are two pictures, very helpful. I'll probably try to copy this topology when I get back to work on monday. 
Here's the link to it, anyway. And also you need a login. Anyway: http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/chapter_2_building_a_cage
That's it folks! Got lots to do. Toodles.
No comments:
Post a Comment