Locomotive Opening

When we started we became very excited over an idea of a vector style opening like 'Catch me if you can'. This idea never really got much further until the last moments befor hand-in when me and Ben sat down and planned the whole sequence out. Between us we rendered all the images we needed and I edited it together to some nice music. Afterwards I also edited this together with the scenes we had rendered to make our final film showreel.

The result for the opening looked much better than I imagined so we're happy to use it for the final film.

LocoShowOpening from James D on Vimeo.

ANI13043 - Client Orientated Practise & Team Production

It was hard to find time away from our film to work on other peoples, but in the end I animated a few pieces for Matts 'Psychadelic Panda Launch'. Here the clips,

PandaBotScene1 from James D on Vimeo.

This scene was difficult because where I thought independant legs for the design would make the job easier, it proved to be far more difficult than I had imagined. Luckily the PandaBot in the final render will be behind the buildings shown, making the legs pretty much entirely obscured.

PandaBotDown from James D on Vimeo.

This clip was much easier than the first. I had to model a low poly rocket to fly at the panda and then a seperate one for after the explosion (which will be done in post). Because this scene was not really planned for the film, I did the layout for this scene aswell.

PandatroopHeadshot from James D on Vimeo.

This panda was much easier to use, with added blood effects for the entry and exit wound have made this clip look really good.

Animation

The animation started a little later than we had planned in the gant chart, but still was going well. There was, however, not enough time to do it in. I found that I had to stick to scheduels and not work on each scene for too long or we would never had a finished film, which meant not spending as long as I would have liked on each scene, particularly the long ones such as scene two.

Long before I started animating any final shots I did alot of research into characters whos acting styles I thought would be neccesary to our main character. The main point of reference I chose were Rowan Atkinsons 'Mr Bean' and Mr Collins from the 2005 version of 'Pride and Prejudice'. The awkwardness of these characters really helped to shape how the Gent moves. The following is a few sketches I took from watchings Mr Collins,



Here are some playblasts and plans of finished animations ready for rendering with some plans.

Shot 2

Shot2_intro from James D on Vimeo.

Shot 10

Scene10_rememberingflowers from James D on Vimeo.

Shot 13-14

Scene1314 from James D on Vimeo.

Shot 22

Scene22_wakingUp from James D on Vimeo.

Shot 37

Scene37_sadGent from James D on Vimeo.

Lady Rig...

In order to save a whole heap of time, we decided to use the Anzovin 'Setup Machine' and 'Face Machine' to rig the young lady. I took this job on since there was no complete rig at the time to start animating on, and found it to be quite easy. The only difficult part was sorting the odd weights on the mesh, which were handled by both me and Ant. The face machine worked even better, with almost no problems on the weights. Here is a demo of the rig in action...

LadyRig Demo from James D on Vimeo.

The eyes and extras (string tying up headress etc) were put in after by Ant as they were a little too minor to deal with in setup machine.

It seemed to work fine, I did a quick animation test and was happy with the result. When we came to use it in a real scene however, it ended in disaster. It seemed that when the rig was put into a scene with one of our other rigs, both rigs ended up broken. We are not completely sure what has caused this problem, we can only speculate that it is to do with the rig nodes that are needed to use the rig when made...

Broken Rigs from James D on Vimeo.

With no real way to fix this problem Ant will have to re-rig the lady which is sure to set us back a while. Still this was only a way to save time and though it hasn't worked, it may help to keep consistency.

Paint Looking Test

I've worked for a while trying to get a painted look that we want for the film. It has taken a while but I am finally on the right track. After searching the internet for a solution we found a great movie tutorial from Siggraph which achieved the look using displacement, which I couldn't really get to work in Maya as the tutorial was originally for Blender. The closest I got using this technique didn't quite have the look we wanted so I scrapped it.



After finding another way to create the look using Maya Fur the results were alot more successful. By rendering out separate passes of fur with different opacity, brush length, density etc we can get just the look we want. I have created a few different setups with varying messiness and subtleness, the most recent and appealing version only needs three render passes with a little post work in After Effects. This is one of the earlier results.




These are the later, more refined results. I had the render out the fur with an invisible cowboy that could block out the back to stop the hollow look in the previous passes. I also blurred the edges in post of the pass with no fur to help blend the passes together for a better look.

5 Layers, very messy look...



3 layers, less messy, more detail...

Character Turnarounds

The two characters i've been charged with modeling are now complete. Here's the turnarounds...

Final Characters...

After alot of toil and debate over what our characters should look like, we have finally decided on designs for the four main characters for our film. We spent alot of time on it and in the end we had to settle instead of using more and more of our small production time on designs. Even so, I am pleased with the way our characters turned out and so here are the turnarounds for the three characters I drew the final designs for...