Dragon Bait and Animate

We've been given another Going Live project this semester involving the composition of a character into live action footage. I've done a little composition before for my honours project but it was all done in After Effects and Premiere Pro whereas now I'll be using Nuke. So we spent yesterday out trying to film some footage and it was very difficult! The weather was against us for almost all of the day with it changing every 5 minutes! We tried as best we could and managed to snag a few minutes of locked footage. Now it's a case of preparing the footage for compositing and animating the character!

We started work on our storyboards sometime last week and after the Beano's feedback we had another meeting and discussed how we could incorporate their feedback. We had a lot of back and forth and eventually managed to tighten up our ending and keep our pacing and momentum throughout the short. Anna and Tao created the storyboards, basing everything on Anna's art and I pulled together the animatic and adjusted the timings. We also added a little music to keep some interest. And here are a couple of my favourite storyboards from Anna and Tao.

After the Faun sculpt I did I wanted to try a similar piece to see if I could apply a lot of the things I'd learned. I also threw down a quick polypaint today to mess about with colour. The Unicorn - High Poly Sculpt by Leah McEwen on Sketchfab

I spent Thursday and Friday at the Move Summit in Edinburgh where there were some fantastic talks from lots of industry experts. It was great to get to network with the professionals between talks and at the evening sessions. (Where there might have been pizza...) Some of the highlights for me were both of the Aardman talks, Unity discussing real time rendering looking at their short 'Adam', the BlueZoo talk about their studio and the Axis Animation talk on Happy!   I definitely got a lot out of the summit and I'm feeling more focused on what I want out of the course as well as where I want to push myself creatively. I especially need to thank Bruce Sutherland from Axis Animation for the slap in the face he gave me about graduating and job hunting, it was something I really needed and was a good reality check.  Also, it's always fun to hang out with these nerds.

I spent the weekend working on a sculpt in ZBrushCore because I was getting bored of Maya! I used one of my old sketches as a reference and messed about using a couple of different YouTube tutorials as helpers to keep me going. One thing about ZBrushCore is the lack of tools that would have helped me with the hair, so I may come back to it later. But it was a lot of fun and I learnt loads! The Faun - Sculpt by Leah McEwen on Sketchfab My ArtStation has it here too: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/QyLvl

So I spent a few days updating my storyboards to make the timings a bit better and the story more clear. I then did the usual and put these all together in an animatic. (With some cheesy music...)

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...

I spent a little while working on setting up a basic scene in Maya and found a lot of inspiration the the PS4 game 'Bound'.  I love the way they do the far away scenery and I like the idea of the world cracking and moving around my character so I tried to incorporate this into the test scene I was building.  There's a lot that still needs to be worked on, especially the far away background but I'm happy with how it's slowly coming together. I also spent a bit more time playing about with lighting in Maya and trying to get it to look a bit more like I wanted it to look originally and the idea that the face is projecting it's own light and coming to life. Again, there's lots more to work on but I feel like I'm getting somewhere.

I was thinking today about an older concept I had when I started developing the current idea for 'Cure' and I think it would be easier for me to focus on research on something I really care about: Mental Health. The narrative throughout 'Cure' was initially developed with the thought of depression and loneliness being at the centre. The loneliness aspect was singled out for most of the continued development but I would like to bring it back to its roots of depression. With this in mind, I spent today thinking about lighting. After running a couple of tests in Maya, (Lighting in Maya is hard) I sketched up some rough thumbnails of how I wanted the lighting to appear to the audience. So I want to run some more tests and practice lighting in general for the future. In other news, I put together a little comparison image of some concept art and the final model.