Animation: January 2014

Environmental Research Part 2

As I wanted to go for a semi-realistic approach for my digital environment, I thought I'd start looking at real images of deserts, as opposed to pure concept work. I saved a file full of visual resources to use as inspiration, including different kinds of terrain and the specific colour palette I was aiming to use.

I compiled these images into a moodboard, selecting a few favourites as my main source of inspiring imagery.

As one of my friends, Rod, is wanting to specialise in concept art, he offered to do some concept artwork for me to use on my project.

I'm extremely happy with the work that he's produced, and I love the style he applies to his sketchwork which is very fitting with the rocky, other-worldly landscape. It works perfectly with what I plan to model, and the rock shapes will certainly prove useful when it comes to texturing.

Environment Research Part 1

For this term's project we're having to focus on creating a digital environment - with or without the characters we had designed and modelled last term. Over the break I had refined my lizard model so I wanted to keep in mind an environment that could involve him. Before I wanted to settle on a specific idea, however, I wanted to look at some different options.

I looked at backgrounds used in Disney films such as 'Princess and the Frog', 'Tangled', 'Aladdin' and 'Mulan', looking closely at their use of colour and light.

I also went to The London Sea Life Centre to see the kind of environments that fish and other underwater life live in. Aside from the physical stone backdrop the aquarium provides, there is an abundance of life that creates the environments, such as anemones and sea weed. The way the water makes them move creates an other worldly feel, which adds to the environment in its own right.

As a group we visited Dennis Severs' house in London - a house in Shoreditch that has been entirely kept as a Victorian household. No electricity, nothing modern, it was a snapshot into life 150 years ago. As an environment, it was fascinating - it was nothing I'd ever experienced before other than behind glass at a museum. But aside from the ancient objects and furniture, it was the atmosphere that hit me the most; the smells, the lighting, the sounds. I realised that creating an environment is not just about creating a look, but creating a mood.

I think a film that incorporated mood as well as scenery was 'Rango' - it's also closer to what I have in mind for my environment. The barren desert scenes and ransacked towns worked well with the narrative and feel of the film, as did the heavily muted colours.

The 'Home on the Range' concept backgrounds also proved to be a valuable resource to me. Although the film was relatively unsuccessful, I enjoy the stylised approach to the concepts. The exaggerated, blocky colours are reminiscent of Looney Tunes 'Road Runner' backdrops. The visual approach and content is exactly what I'm looking for, but I need to be careful not to make things too complicated for myself.

Bearded Dragon

During the Christmas holidays I decided to model my bearded dragon.

The modelling process would have been relatively easy however I encountered some pretty irritating problems in Maya which hugely held me back. As I posted previously, my software in 2013 had a number of bugs which affected navigating the scene and some specific tools. A simple process such as zooming into a specific area to rearrange vertices would take minutes as opposed to seconds, and it slowed my workflow down completely.

The examples above show the problems I had in orthographic viewports - they would often rotate, sometimes without me realising, which would alter how I'd use the image planes. I had to restart the model a number of times to rectify the problems it caused.

It got to a certain point where I decided I couldn't model with the bugs anymore, so I decided to uninstall and download 2014. Unfortunately, I was faced with more problems - 2014 wouldn't install because of my OS, as well as being affected by problems caused by Maya 2013. I also couldn't reinstall 2013, and I still haven't been able to solve as to why.
I ended up installing Maya 2012, importing my model as an OBJ. Most of the problems have been solved now, however Maya 2012 does still frequently crash without warning, meaning that I'm still losing a lot of work.

My solution will be to do a manual backup of my laptop, wipe the hard disk and reboot to a previous OS. However, I can't do this until a buy a new hard drive! If this doesn't solve the issues I don't know what will!

Getting into Character

In my brief experience of modelling over the past 6 months, I'd usually start modelling my character in Maya. However, I thought I'd take my tutor's advice and start out by making an armature in ZBrush and develop from there. I thought it would also be a good opportunity to get used to the programme so that I can start learning its functions properly.

As a starting point, the armature was good for getting practice, but I could tell that the anatomy was off so I thought I'd start again using the character sheet I'd previously drawn.

Being so precise in my drawing took a lot of patience - I began with rough tracings of my bearded dragon in photoshop, and made a number of small subtle changes to the anatomy and appearance. I then had to attempt to make the drawings symmetrical in order to make the modelling process easier.

I took these images into ZBrush and made an image plane, resulting in the following armature:

I found that modelling in Zbrush from the beginning was awkward and didn't get me the results I wanted - I also worried about correct topology as this character is something I actually want to rig, animate and work with. As the deadline was also getting closer, I decided to go back into Maya and start modelling a different, simpler character design I'd done previously.