Character Assignment - Storyboards and ZBrush

For my character assignment, I've been working on some storyboards for a while now. They are very rough and very basic so I want to go back and re-do them with a little more focus on movement and also have the ratio correct (16:9) or at least as close to that as I can.

The story revolves around the Dragon Walker summoning a dragon from the fire outside her tent. Ideally, I think I'll add in an audience or the rest of the tribe watching her summon this as if it's a massive event that people come from all over to witness.

Last week I also worked in ZBrush. Outside of class, this is the first thing I've created and I wanted to start with something a little smaller but still with a lot of detail so I decided to make the skull from the Dragon Walker concept art.

It's still a really low resolution so I'll add detail later and increase the resolution to get a good final product.

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Cure - Advanced Skeleton 5

I spent a fair chunk of the day yesterday playing around with Advanced Skeleton 5 in Maya and honestly, it's amazing. I wasn't sure how well it would work with my model because it is so low poly but I came out surprisingly well. So Advanced Skeleton gives you the joints from a template and once they're all lined up you can build the controllers to see how it will move. Because you do all of this in stages, you can change and update the rig at any point. There are a few different methods to bind the skin and this is one of them, but in the end I didn't use the Skin Cage because it didn't seem necessary for my model. Once the body rig was done I spent a LONG time trying to get the facial rig to work. I was clearly doing something wrong the first few times I tried it because it worked just fine when I sat down and worked through it step by step! The skeleton also comes with pre-made walk cycles so I put my character into these to see how the de...

Cure - Feedback and Final Tweaks

After our final presentations on Friday I took on board the feedback from the lecturers and implemented it into a final version of Cure. I agreed with everything they said and listed off what needed to be fixed: The biggest issue was that the story wasn't coming across properly as the 'dying polygons' were only ever there in the first few shots and the character didn't seem to lose that many polygons. There were some camera shots that lingered for almost 10 seconds and they needed some variation. Some of the animation needed to be more obvious and expressive. There were errors in the recording from Unity, the eyes flickered and the lighting updates needed to be cut at the beginning of each camera change. The sound needed to be boasted as it didn't come across through a TV. I first fixed the issues of the dying polygons by adding more black polygons to the character that progressively spread as the film went on until she got the cure. I kept these to the...

Tumblr

I've really enjoyed keeping a production blog throughout my masters course so I'm hoping on over to Tumblr where I can follow some other awesome 3D artists! So you can find me here: http://harlequin-werewolf.tumblr.com/ Also, a few of my classmates are on Tumblr here: https://diebrigkuchler.tumblr.com/ https://myanimationjourney.tumblr.com/ https://picturemoving.tumblr.com/ https://tututugod.tumblr.com/ http://mayacossette.tumblr.com/

Dragon Bait and Animate

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