Playblasts

Next job is to add the drawings in the background and sort out the lighting. Here are the animations for all three clips so far. Then to render and add credits!

Lions & Cows/Rabbits & Bunnies

Chihuahua Wedding

@Alan - circles around eyes in render

When I render my character at the moment I have circles appearing around the eyes. I'm guessing this may have something to do with the bleed and/or the eyeballs in Photoshop? I think Hannah had the same problem. How do I correct this?

"Sometimes you can get married with a dog... in your hands..."

After a slight technical hitch where I lost my hair, I re-added the contraints and I'm now animating.

Love this bit! This is what it's all about for me. Happy.

First playblast - lip syncing

This is the first playblast of the lip-syncing for one of Alice's audios. Still work to do but I'll animate next and then tweak the lip-syncing and eyes afterwards. There are a couple of bits where her mouth & eyes aren't moving because there will be credits there instead.

Enjoying this bit. 

Rigging Complete.

 Finally finished rigging my character today after losing a load of work last week. Now to complete the facial rigging and on to animating.

Joints, Skinning & Rigging

I'm in the process of rigging my character now. Thanks to Super Alan I now have a tidy character with the correct geometry and joints. I've skinned her and added weights and now need to rig. 

I've added her eyes and mouth using a projection to get the spacing right and the next job after rigging will be to do the facial rigging. All the components are ready in Photoshop so I will be aiming to move over to Maya later today/tomorrow. It has taken a little bit of jiggling around to get her eyes and mouth in a position I'm happy with and to make sure they're not too distorted by the roundness of her face. 

I'm going to spend a bit of time listening back to the audio and writing down a storyboard with timings and which phonemes will be needed where. Lots to do!

2D faces into Maya

Today I will mostly be...

...putting these faces into Maya!

I made the pupils bigger than originally planned because I think it makes her look cuter. I've included all the phonemes as well as different expressions. I'm looking forward to animating!

Alice in colour!

The main modelling of Alice has been done now and I'm going to start working on her facial features. I'll draw these in Photoshop and then move them over to Maya as per the Poma facial rigging tutorial. 

She'll have a motif on her dress which I'll add on and some accessories, such as a fairy wand and wings and perhaps a cat. These I'll work on after I've finished my main character. 

I will also start working on the background to my animation soon after a very useful discussion with alumni Chrissie Peters. She offered me some great advice about how to project the different papers I want to use onto planes so I'll be experimenting with them. Once I'm happy with the backgrounds I can start working on the gifs for the children's drawings that will be accompanying Alice's speech and again, I'm hoping to project these onto a plane in Maya as a transparency.

Exciting stuff...

Alice has hair!

Because she's worth it...

I want my character's hair to look messy so I think this has worked ok. I used a lattice deformer and joints to create the curls and waves.  

My next job is to texture the hair and I'd like it to look like strands of wool so I'll play around with UVs in Photoshop.

 As well as working on the textures I'll also be creating her facial features. The real life Alice has a lot of facial expressions so I'm going to pick a few which show her character.

Crazy faces...

Alice in Maya

Thanks to help from Alan, I'm progressing with my model of Alice a lot better now, after a few duff starts. Currently I'm working on her hands and how these will work. They only need to hold very simple objects (like a fairy wand for instance) and so will be more like mittens with a simple pincer grip. 

I've had a play around with hair but at the moment can only seem to get hair on half of her head. Her hair will be very simple but I want it to be curly and bounce when she runs along. @Alan - which is the best tutorial to use for this now? Should I use nHair or would it work better to create curly strands and use a deformer? 

After I've finished the modelling, I'll texture and rig it. Her legs will be more rigid stick legs with a simple bend at the knee, whereas her arms will be bendy so I'll look to use a deformer for these.

Getting there...

Minor Project presentation

That’s all-no video by emorley3 on Scribd

The Blob mixdown from Emma Morley on Vimeo.
LIONS & COWS mixdown 1 from Emma Morley on Vimeo.

Minor Project - Characters and audio coming together

Beginning to piece together all the parts of the puzzle now. Editing the audio is taking longer than I anticipated due to the differences in volume and quality of the tracks. In the meantime I've been working on the Poma and 2D Maya tutorials as I will be using these techniques in my final animation. I've also been working on the character designs using the drawings my children have made. I'm hoping to produce 3 characters, though they will be quite simple and most of the detail will come in the facial movements. Alan suggested I look at a programme called nDo which will help me with texturing. Below are a few of the drawings I've copied from the kids' artwork and I'm going to make an amalgamation of my favourite features. For example, I like the hair of number 1 and the eyes of number 4. Lucy seems to have a thing for drawing her people in high heels so I think this is something I need to include! Any comments on these would be greatly received. I've also shown how I am working on them in Photoshop to achieve a 'drawn' effect as if the children have drawn them themselves. I'm creating the facial features in different layers as in the Poma facial rigging tutorial so I can animate in the same way. 

Finally here are a couple of the audio tracks that I've edited. I see the 'Lions & Cows' one as part of a section about animals. Lucy will introduce it and almost be interviewing her little sister Alice about her favourite animals. I'm hoping to animate a little 'Alice' in an animal costume with childlike drawings of the animals being "friends" and "not being nice to each other" as you can hear in the audio. The 'Star Wars' one I could see as Emily trying desperately to talk about one of her favourite films with her smallest sister running around in the background shooting Lucy who, being a bit girly and princessy, is most unimpressed about all of it. Feedback welcome!

Minor Project beginnings - audio tests

Sculpting 12/04/16

Really enjoying the sculpting lessons we have recently started. We have been set the task of recreating the bust of a character of our choice. I chose to model the Star Wars character Admiral Ackbar. I thought his head shape and features would make for a fun challenge and I am really enjoying the progress so far. This week we added bulk to our model and started to define distinctive shapes.

Acting week!

This week was acting week so yesterday and today we had lessons with actor Dan to help us with animation. In all honestly I was dreading the lessons because performing is not my strong point, but early on it was clear that we were going to have lots of fun.

In yesterday's class we had a few simple activities to break the ice and introduce ourselves to Dan. Then we had to team up and mould our friends into different positions and later on told stories with three different poses. We also played 'keepy uppy' with a toy cheeseburger which for me was the highlight of the day! 

Thursday's lesson involved more improvisation and thinking on our feet. We teamed up and created objects with our bodies and also had to get a message across to the audience and our partners just by using mime. Lots of fun and I'm really looking forward to next week's lesson. Here are a couple of quick happy snaps from today...

Actor Dan

Character Project

Crit Presentation-Character Project PDF

Main Character designs

My main character is very pliable and can use its five limbs in many different ways as shown in the poses above, though its movements are restricted depending on the fabric being worn.

At the beginning of each level, the player chooses which outfit to put the character in depending on the materials needed to complete the world. These are some examples.

Character Project - Game Interface/Title Screen

Character Project OGR

Character Project OGR

Tempted to name this game 'Scrapbook Challenge' - cheesy?

Narrative Project - Thumbnails and Reference Images

These are a few character ideas I'd had. Because they are toys I liked the idea of using simple shapes. I see them as made from wood, quite elegant with painted faces. Their clothes would be very bland at the beginning of the story, but as the characters change, I imagined their outfits more flowing and colourful and made from fabric, rather than painted onto the body of the toy as they are at the start.

Quick environment sketch to show the inside of the factory. Needs more work.

 For a bit of research and something to springboard from, I gathered some images together of how I imagined the style and look of aspects of the animation. I went with a Russian theme as this is something the group have dipped in and out of throughout our discussions. 

Russian costume, once the characters have transformed during their dance. I see this kind of style with patterns which could be mirrored in the environment once the mood of the story changes.

Some quick reference material for factories. These show both men and women at work, what they would have worn and the working conditions they would have been subject to. Lots of monotonous lines of machinery, lots of repetition.

A quick look at some Russian architecture for when the couple are dancing. The buildings and scenery would change and grow as their love builds. Again, I've gone with the theme as the colours and style would all complement each other. I like the shapes of these buildings, which would tie in nicely with the cogs and twirl of the female character's dress as she is dancing.

These images are Russian designs again which I thought could work well in transitions, or in the costumes or music box design. The image middle-right is a Bird of Freedom which I thought also links to the story nicely, though I can't easily see how we could include it in the animation.