Dragon Bait and Animate

Today we had our pitches for Going Live 2018 at the Beano Studios. Our pitch for Ping and Noodle focused on the personality of our characters and how they would work together. We pulled together what research we had done on Ping and how we could modernise it. All the work below belongs to Anna: We added in our narrative in a more defined sense for the client as follows: In the kitchen, Ping wants to make some dinner for himself and Noodle but Noodle has other ideas. The mischievous ferret decides he wants to order some pizza instead and when he doesn’t get his way, things get chaotic. He pushes over pots and pans, spilling pasta and meatballs forcing Ping to stretch and twist until he’s completely tangled! Noodle sees his mistake and helps Ping get untangled and after seeing the state of the kitchen, the two order up a pizza and relax. All in all I think the pitch went really well. I think they liked our sense of humour and the simple nature of our idea which shou...

So for Going Live 2018 my team has chosen Ping and we know the narrative will be happening in a kitchen so I sketched up a rough floor plan as well as some assets that might be in the kitchen that could fit in with Ping's design already created by Anna and Tao.  With this idea I constructed a rough base in Maya that represented the 3D environment of Ping and Noodle's (the ferret) kitchen. This could then be used as a base for 2D matte painting as well as staging the characters.  So I tried out some different colour combos as well as angles that might work to set the scene. Before placing Ping and Noodle in the scene to see if their colours balanced

Part of our course involves working to a client brief. This year, our client is Beano Studios in Dundee and they've asked us to take one of their old IPs and create a 30 second short film. We were split into 4 groups of 3 and of the four characters provided, our group decided to work with a character called Ping, the Elastic Man. This character had a very small run in the Beano comic and was virtually a blank canvas so we thought with him, we had the most potential. We started drafting up some rough ideas over the next couple of ideas, thinking both about the narrative and how we could modernise this character. We also briefly talked about how we would animate this short film but haven't been able to come to a solid conclusion yet. We decided to give Ping a sidekick so that he had someone to bounce off of. We also wanted this sidekick to be a contrast to Ping who we had decided was a fun-loving friendly guy. Anna immediately came up with some great sketches of a ferret and ...

So I think I'm comfortable in saying that my master's project will be called 'Cure' so I'm just going to refer to it as that from now on. Yesterday and today I have been messing about with blendshapes. They seem really easy to set up and considering how low poly I'm working it seems like the best option rather than building an entire face rig that doesn't have that many polys to work with. So I've been doing some tests on how it might look in the end. It turns out smile is the hardest for me to try and represent on my model so I think I'll need to keep working on that. Otherwise, it's super fun and really interesting to see what kind of mix of shapes you can get too.

Yesterday we were talking about our projects again and Ryan reminded me of a game I saw at E3 a couple of years ago: Bound. Bound has a really cool low poly style which is particularly effective in the environments. I love the movement and how the environment pulls itself together and shifts as the character moves. I'm not sure how much I'd be able to incorporate into my final project but I think this is quite important in terms of inspiration.

I've spent the last couple of days doing a UV unwrap and doing some renders with colour and wireframes then a mix.

I finished a base mesh of my model and it sits at around 1600 polygons. From here I extruded clothes and hair before adding in some grey shades through Hypershade as well as making the hair pink but I'm not sure if that's going to stay. With hair, clothes, eyes and the 'device' in my character's ear, I have around 2000 polygons. I want to run these models past my lecturers to see what they think and if the character looks 'low poly' or just like I have bothered smoothing out the character.  With a model finished, I tried messing about with the Quick Rig tool in Maya which was actually super easy to use and gave me a pretty good base that I could build on.  There are some issues with the rig, namely under the shoulders and the hands that need to be tweaked in the future but it's a start.

I'm going to put this here before I forget. I spent some time today trying to build a different head for my model as I do want to have expressions on my character but I ended up going back to the head I had modelled in November. I spent a while going through edge loops and deleting what wasn't absolutely necessary until I had something I liked a little more. As a test I imported this new head into the model I had finished up yesterday to see if they would work together and I think I like this style more than what I had initially whipped up. (Although there are several triangles... don't tell Sang).

Well the winter break has been miserable for me. I have been really ill for the past 3 weeks which has been super annoying and I haven't been able to concentrate at all. So this week I'm going to do my best to get as much done as possible before going back to uni. First things first I want to simplify my character. I pulled together a simple model in Maya yesterday but I want to speak to my lecturers about topology and general modelling before I go too far. I think I might push the shapes further rather than just having a basic female shape and see what I can do to give the character more personality without adding too much detail. My issue at the moment is the face as I want to be able to convey some emotion through the face but I still need it to be low poly so I want to see how I can create facial features without 'breaking' the model.  I also want to look into putting in a very basic rig and seeing what kind of movement I can get from a low poly mod...