Dragon Bait and Animate

I've spent a little while working on how the kitchen is going to look for Ping and Noodle and our Beano Studios project but it's taking a lot longer than I would like... Trying to get the shader to look the way I want it to is tough but I think I just need to have a bit more patience! However, I think if we take the shots we need and do some post in Photoshop we can get a look we need for the background. My plan is to render them larger than we need i.e. more than 1920x1080 so that we can crop in After Effects/Premiere to what we need and use them to pan around a scene.

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...

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