Dragon Bait and Animate

So far the Beano Project seems to be going quite well. We've set up a little production line where Anna would do the sketches for Ping and Noodle, Tao would line them and separate their layers and I would colour and export as transparent PNG files. This way we can layer up the images in Adobe After Effects and animate each layer individually if we need to. This is how I've set myself up in Photoshop to colour the images: I had also done a couple of little experiments in After Effects to see how Noodle might animate but since then Anna has done some nicer animations! I also messed with the colour in the kitchen scene and so I'm going to spend some time tomorrow trying to tidy it up for the background renders.

Earlier in the week I went to see A Quiet Place and as someone that doesn't watch a lot of horror films, it was not what I expected. The premise of A Quiet Place is pretty simple: There are monster out there and if you make a sound, they'll come for you and it's safe to say that I have never felt more tense in a cinema (And on a side note, that was the quietest cinema I have every been in). The film's main dialogue comes from sign language with a few rare vocalised sentences. This means, for the most part, that we're focused on how the characters move, how they act rather than what they say and I was shocked at how quickly I felt attached to the characters: I didn't want them to be in this situation, I wanted them to be safe but, shockingly, they weren't. The pace of the film is just enough to make you think that there's a safe respite ahead and there are gaps in the chaos before a sound crashes through the screen snapping you awake. There are m...

I was away on holiday last week so spent a couple of days working on my anatomy in ZBrush Core but it turned into a little piece based on an old painting of mine. I'm actually really happy with how the face came out so I might re-purpose it for another project, possibly Diebrig's as she needs models for the Bee Hand Maidens. 

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...

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...

I started sculpting Elara the mermaid almost a month ago! But Going Live and my Research Presentation kind of got in the way and I didn't have time to finish her. So I sat down at the weekend and today and finished her up. Based on a piece by Nikhil Shinde More on my ArtStation! This was the first time I sculpted in pose and based on someone else's concept art. It was loads of fun and I'm looking forward to doing some characters based on classmates work for upcoming projects.