INTERIM 02

To add on to what Kevin said

• Amanda said the background lighting is too harsh
• The colour for the background is too saturated
• Con-ner should change hat. Straw hat. 

• Amanda did mention about having too many scenes
• Character sheets ( after looking at YC's group working )
• Split work

I SAY

Right now, I'm cleaning up storyboards

and taking out some unnecessary shots. 

Also, I'll have to do character sheet since

I'm the character designer. 

Much work to doo.

What's new last presentation for character design was

the grandmother. 

yeah, she looks white, clean and healthily sick. 

Anyone wanna do proper schedule? 

it's 11.11 p.m. 

Why doesn't blogger show the correct time.  =( 

Interim 2

Interim 2 just ended

Raj couldn't attend 'cus he had to go to a talk, so it was just the four of us to present. it went pretty well in my opinion, but there's the definite need buck up and pick up the pace if we're ever going to finish this animation by submission time or at least complete a seizable amount before that.

Amanda commented that our animation is the closest to the outside industry's grade, so it worries me that what could be considered small may end up consuming too much time for this project. nevertheless, we (or at least me) will deal with it as it goes.

Set Design Progress

A few updates on the set design and rendering. I think I'm kind of getting the hang of the lighting. Of course there's no set dressing yet - this is just the initial stage where the furniture is being placed on the set. Once the furniture is done, then food cans and other things will be placed to dress up the set.

Talks and what nots

Melvin from Blue Sky studios came down to give a talk today. I think I've learnt a lot from this talk. All the things mentioned such as breaking rigs, having a collection of inspirational animation pieces really got me thinking. It was a pity the others didn't make it for the talk as they would have learnt a whole lot.
I guess what I really took from the talk was that dreams that we all had as kids of making it big in the industry will always remain dreams until we decide to do something about it.
Did animation tests in the 2d lab in the afternoon. Traditional 2d animation is proving to be really tedious. I guess it pays to be patient as an animator.
There was a second talk in the late afternoon, nothing much to talk about for that one. Overall, i find traditional 2d animation to be a rather daunting task.

Grandma conner is still in the making. but it's pretty much it. 

The dude's pretty finalised .

Changed the cashier's look a little more to what dion drew in the storyboards. Or at least I attempted to. 

I SAY

Things are pretty much still in control. We've split up the work and we're going into animation for the presentation on thursday soon! like... later today. We're each animating a little and it's pretty exciting. Decided to go with the light box traditional animating thing. It'd be interesting to try something new I guess. Hurray! 

Commence, the unhealthy days! (:

Exterior Set Renders

Here are a few things that I have been working on. It's all works in progress, nothing is finalised. Everthing has been rendered using the toon shading technique using the standard Maya software renderer. No lights and shadows have been added yet. The textures are not final too.

Exterior set - helicopter view

Close up of gas pumps on path

Camera view similar to that of the storyboard I drew earlier on

This car was modeled by Greg. I took it, gave it some textures and rendered it with a spotlight in a toon fashion.

One major problem I would face is lighting. Because of the way the rendering works, I can't seem to get soft and diffused lighting. Notice the harsh cone lining on the above car image. This might pose a challenge for me when I light up the set. Another problem I would face is that the system lags when I try to orbit around the set. This happens because the black outlines you see in the pictures are actually a polygonal object. This adds extra geometry to the scene, thus requiring Maya to use up more memory. I would have to add the outlines at the last stage when I'm ready for rendering.

Gas Pump Test Renders

Hello,

I started modeling the 3D set, and I started with the exterior. I decided to model the gas pump first. So this is the reference image I used:

And here's the finished model with some rough cell shading test renders. The textures have not been put into place.

I feel pretty excited to model the rest of the set and render it in this manner. Tomorrow I shall continue by creating the decal textures for the gas pump in a cartoony style and start modeling the main building and roads. Seems fun... :)