Cure - Lighting and Deeper Meaning

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.

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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 - Animation Tests

I created a really simple and rough animation to test out a kind of animation style I had been looking in to. I know I don't want something smooth or too natural looking as it wouldn't match the character art or environment. I recently saw the Into the Spider-Verse trailer and was really intrigued by this kind of 'stop-motion' style of animation so gave it a go in Maya. I tried the animation with auto tangents before switching to stepped tangents on every 2nd frame and then every 4th (roughly). I actually really like 4s but I want to see how this looks with a full body animation rather than just facial.

Going Live 2018 - Storyboards and Animatics

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.

Dragon Bait and Animate

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