close-ups

week 5: animatic! :D

I've never really pulled off a succesful animatic so I hope this looks ok. Like i've said before, i'm not really an animator, more of a concept artist, for environments and characters, so taking the idea from paper to maya is always a challnge for me. And always dissappointing when it doesn't look quite right... this looks quite accurate to the vision of this project. It still needs a lot of work, but you know how it feels when a project is starting to feel like it will work... always a good feeling...

week 5: final environment... ish

Kanika really needed some kind of finished environment at this point to start animating the puma in. So this week was a tough week of deadlines. Here are the images of it starting to come together.

week 4: laying down the foundations (roads etc...)

At this point we had alot of the things we wanted to put in the scene but not the scene itself. Perhaps a very foolish way of doings things but due to illnesses we just didn't have the energy to spend time thinking of the layout just yet. Lukily we saved so much time finding a already built and rigged puma, all of which i had to do was re-model it to suit us. Anyways, this was sucha diffcult part of the naiamtion. We were still uncertain how we wanted to middle to look so it was becoming a bit walking blind. We tried not to over complicate the situation so we worked out how many seconds it would take to reach one end and kept it simple.

As you can see, extremely simple and quite bare at the moment. Kanika modelled a simple, but i think effective cab. It looks quite quirky...? it still needs a lot of work in this scene though! We knew we had to be patient with it all coming together so we continued to just model things and put them in, whilst still trying to think of a narrative of his journey.

Week 3: Random Foliage

This we had to really think about. At first I assumed this would be a pretty easy task to do, model a few random plants and put them together... however, when we did this, it just didn't look like a jungle. We had ot go back to the drawing board and look at plants that really have that jungle 'edge'. Images we found of jungles were, of course, so densed with foliage that if we intended to accurately model a jungle, it would prove aniamtion incredibly difficult due to lag reasons.
I really like the 'pinty' leavs that i'vemodelled here. Again, i'm not going to win an awards for amazing modelling, but for our 'gritty/blocky' animation to work we aren't expecting everyone to be impressed. Check out our other work if you prefer to see more media style modelling...
This bush is just the leaves which i modelled for the trees. We are really trying to push ourselves in not wasting time over little things which aren't seen on the screen for long. ifit doesthe job well, lets not worry about silly things like, is there an accurate join in the middle of the bush with a stem and roots etc... lol

Schedule:

-Start laying down the foudnations and base layout of the environment so we can start putting in the random objects we modelled
-Kanika to start walkcycle tests with puma model
colour tests to be started

street_background

We wanted to incorporate as much 'London' as possible as our background. Original pictures show city landmarks such as 'big ben', London eye and london bridge being quite dominant. after a few tests, we felt that landmarks such as london eye etc... should actually appear i nthe foreground more. Here are a few images ofthe simple buildings we are using for our background. we went for a simple row of shops with very little detail. They need a bit more work, and possibly a bit more simplifying. The only thought so far is that it needs to represent london more... so we may have a different background of taller buildings such as skyscrapers.