Ping and Noodle - Kitchen and After Effects

I realise I've been pretty quiet on here but I have been working away at the 3D kitchen scene for Ping and Noodle over the last week. There still needs to be some colour tweaks because the character won't quite fit in with it just yet but I think it's mostly pulling down the saturation.

Right now I have 3 light sources in the scene for the 2 windows and the door but I might swap a window out and add in a light at the microwave or the oven as a colour light but we'll see how it all comes together. At least now, if we're unhappy with something we don't completely have to re-draw it, we can just make a few tweaks and re-render.

In other news I looked at pulling a sketch Anna had done of Noodle into Photoshop and tidying it up. Then I took it into After Effects and tried out the Puppet Warp tool to animate it a little. It took longer than I thought but most of it was a learning experience more than anything. If we have the right character art we can streamline a lot of our animation process (I hope)

Anna's sketch

So the character was broken down into the body and then the arm that will be seen. After these tests I think it's obvious that we could break down the character further and experiment more with the animation.

For some reason, the gif is running really slow but it's fine as an MP4 file.

Comments

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.

Cure - Story and Unity

On Monday we had a chat with Mark Grindle again, having met him first in October. We all went through out projects and he helped focus our ideas before we begin final production. Cure has been a little stagnant since we started the Going Live projects but it has always been in the back of my mind. I've looked into scene set up and even mocked up a rough poster. However, after running through the idea with Mark I think it's clear that I need to strip it back even further. I want to keep the core of the story and the themes of mental health and depression. Mark seemed to really like the idea of a fragmented world and the idea of shifting from chaos through to order so I want to take that idea further. Our character should begin in a fragmented world, chaotic and in constant motion but when she finds her 'cure' the world stops and settles but nothing changes: She has still lost parts of herself (I might remove the piles of dead polygons) and the world is still ...

Dragon Bait and Animate

Search This Blog