Dragon Bait and Animate

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...

Today we had some great feedback from Beano Studios on our animatics for Going Live. We still have around a month to finish the project and so we're starting on animating now. Our plan is to do most of the animation in Adobe After Effects using the puppet tool and I've found what looks to be a good tutorial here: And then in more complicated scenes we'll break down the animation more and do some frame by frame animation. I think we're sticking to the Adobe Suite but we'll see how it all comes together in a couple of weeks. In other news, I was working on adding a toon shader to the basic kitchen scene I had set up in Maya. Luckily, it worked (after a couple of attempts) and my plan now is to rebuild the kitchen so it matches the animatic and use renders from Maya as our backgrounds in the final animation. We can also do some basic camera animation in Maya and then import it into After Effects so that seems like a good time saver! Here's a test render wi...

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.

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

The last week has been spent on trying to further solidify my idea in my mind. I spoke with my sister about the rough outline of my idea and as we were talking about a post-apocalyptic environment she suggested that I root the environment in home. For example, when was the last time we saw a nuclear holocaust in Dundee? So I looked into Dundee landmarks and picked out a few I liked: The Discovery Ship The McManus Gallery Law Hill The New Waterfront I think it would be particularly interesting to take one of these locations and create a run down, overgrown version where my character could be seen exploring. I also looked up different concept arts that have used the overgrown, post-apocalyptic setting before: The Last of Us Fallout 3 Fallout 4 Horizon: Zero Dawn Metro 2033 As well as thinking about the environment for my short film, I decided to take a step back and return to the roots of the story. After today's class we discussed the use...