Dragon Bait and Animate

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 ...

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

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.

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 ...

I spent yesterday and today finishing up my model and putting some colour on it. I've since added more detail to the paint as well as posing the character and adding in some lights. I just need to tidy it up and render tomorrow.

I'm very nearly finished my sculpt, just need to add my skirt and tidy up a few things before I paint and pose. I was really unsure to begin with how I would make my braid for the hair but I found a video on YouTube that really helped: So I used this as a basis to build my braid before adding a sphere for the rest of the hair and sculpting it until I was happy. With the hair finished I tidied up some things on the body before adding in some clothing. I built the bracelets in Maya using a torus and pushing the inner ring further into the centre to create a more concave shape. I also built the basis of the gauntlet in Maya using primitives of boxes and deformers to build the basic shape before importing the individual pieces into ZBrush to build the whole gauntlet. I then used masking and the extract tool to pull out the base clothing before going in and adding in bandage-like details. I'm really happy with what I've been able to achieve so...

I re-did my storyboards for my Dragon Walker character assignment and I'm much happier with these boards than my previous attempts. I like the flow of the story better and it was easier to find timings through these boards when building the animatic. Music is important to this animatic so I added in some sound as best I could but I think I want to extend the drum beat until the dragon actually appears from the fire.

I've been spending some time in ZBrush this week and last week to try and build up my character model. I'm actually really enjoying using it but it is quite difficult to get into the interface which is taking up more time than I would like. However, I really like working in it once I get going and have made some progress with my character. I started with a really bad base mesh. I had made it in Maya but I was really unhappy with the topology so I Dynameshed it as soon as I took it into ZBrush. Then I just continued to built up shapes and increase resolution. Still a long way to go, but getting there!

This week I started the 3D modelling for my character assignment having finished up the T-Pose and roughed out an almost-finished base mesh. I finished the base mesh but the topology was not ideal so when I took it into ZBrush I Dynameshed it before starting to move it around to block in my character. After the model was Dynameshed, I just started working on the general shapes needed to match the character concept art and T-Pose.  There is still a lot of work needed in the arms, legs and face but I roughed in the torso as well. I'm trying to keep it very stylised, using references from real anatomy studies as well as looking at some stylised sculpts.