SignShot2

Righty got the back legs working on there now, took a heck of alot longer than i thought i would cause he takes such big strides with his front legs it was challenging to get the back ones working without making it look like he was prancing. I hear what you say about the camera Dan i will try it but for some reason my brain isnt working right now and i cant seems to think of how to do it. And ive tried to add a reach around the corner of the lampost with his from right leg to make it look less mechanical, this i sthe only thing i can think to do without going over and redoing the first 2 secs of animation, which im really not prepared to do right now seeing as i just spent the last 11 hours working on the fecking thing.

Sign shot.

Could really use some feedback on this shot please. Only the body and the front legs are done im just about to make a start on the back legs.

3rd Scene

My third scene, out of all the scenes ive done this probably differs from the animatic the most. This is because i really wanted to play with the animation in this scene and see how much character i could get out of the spider.

This was also probably the hardest shot to animate, its actually two different spiders. Impatient to get on with the animating i started about half way through startin from with when hes lying on the ground. After several failed attempts i decided it would be a heck of alot easier to give him IK handles in his lower legs so that it was easier to get his feet to stay on the ground. So i got that all animated and was happy with it, so i went back to animate the walk and fall but the IK kept mucking up the rig and animation. After spending most of sunday trying to get the thing working i decided that it would be easier to just import a spider with FK handles then have them switch halfway through, so thats what i did. Soon as FK hits the ground IK jumps in and takes his place.

Looking back at this i'm still not satisfed with the fall. And i my have to change the camera, i think the angle makes the approach look a bit funny but i'll see what the others say before i change anything.

2nd scene

Right got the second scene done unless anyone has any objections with it (choose your words very carefully) The entry scene for the spider out from under the car.

This is the first playblast i did. I showed it to Sarah and she thought i should centralize the spider a bit more and add more angle, so i created a new camera and tried from a different angle.

1st scene

Right ive got my first secen pretty much animated... How can simething be "pretty much" animated i hear you ask. Well there more i could do to it but i dunno whether it'll be worth my while, so i thought i shove up playblast and see what people say.

Oh mercy.

Deadline for the spider walk test was on friday, we managed to get it done (Sarah and Myself) in a way we both liked. Pleased with our progress we decided we should celebrate the achivement and play a joke on Dan. We managed to convince him that we didn't manage to get the spider working and so had attatched a pair of legs to one of the bins and was going to replace the spiders.

Dan spent nearly 5 minutes close to tears before Sarah gave the game a way by bursting out laughing... Ahh good times.

Right i'm gonna post the real walk cycle on the team mainpage for all to see.

Updates.

Thought i was overdue an update post so thought i'd let my avid followers (which totals 1 - hey matuku) know what ive been up to.


Righty ive got the rubble workin now so quite a bit of my time has been placing that across the map, the process of creating the rubble doesn't really take that long, placing it in the map and making it look different to all the other rubble in the scene does. But its nearly all done now, i've just got to do the rubble outside Sarah's buildings then im done.
Im gonna wait till we've got cameras locked off before i go in and add any real detail to the rubble though cause i dont really want to waste hours making all the rubble detailed only to find out we're only going to see a quarter of it.

Also note we have a road with pavements and drains and everything, i did alot of this, Sarah did all of the sign posts and lamp posts so hats off to her for that (give ureself a pat on the back if ure reading this Sarah) and it looks like Big Dan has reworked most of the pavement since i gave it to him..........so erm....well i did the crack in the road... i coulda sworn i did more than that...oh and the bollards, the bollards are mine. Early last week Dan bought in a beautiful model of a car which he had spent literally hours working on and painstakingly perfecting till it was practically indistinguishable from a real car, i then got to take it home and spent literally minutes destroying it. I had to get rid of quite alot of faces in this so i could get the roof to crumple and i had to give the car an interior so the chairs and steering wheel are my claim to fame in this model. Sarah has also finished her buildings now which look awesome but were destroyed far more than mine were. Not to be outdone i went back and ripped apart my second building which to be honest needed something more done to it cause it was kinda boring. Can you see the scary face in the destruction? looks kind of like a Jack o lantern.

We also had a cool lecture on lighting and rendering in layers from Rob Jones, I thought it was actually really interesting (well as interesting as lights can be.) I just need to get a copy of after effects from somewhere and then im setup to try it myself. As far as i know we're planning to use the techniques learned in the lecture in our piece because A:Jared threatened us and B: cause there have been some ripplings of uncertainty in the group as to whether hardcore B+W is the way to go, this is something we'll be able to alter within after effects, give it just a subtle hint of colour to make the imagery less harsh.

Also has an interesting day last Friday where a series of complications arose when trying to bring all our finished modelling together, almost as if some mystical power was tying to stop us completing our work. I'm not going to reiterate what happened though, if you don't already know go read Sarah's blog where there is a perfect rendition of the events of the day.

Righty i think thats everything, i'll add anything else as i think of it...

S.O.S

Hit a minor (major) snag.

RUBBLE

Dynamics in Maya just isn't working, im using less than 20 bricks and the computer cant manage the processing power. Only solution i can think up is to do all the rubble manually which sounds like a ridiculous amount of work.

Any Ideas???

Spider Boot Camp

Took me a little while to get the thing moving in a way that im relatively pleased with. My first walk was done from the side view and was only two legs, based on a dog walk cycle(see earlier post for test) The front legs moved fine but i didnt like the way the back legs moved. The way the back legs were modelled they were facing in the opposite direction to the front legs so they would have to be pushing away from the body instead of pulling with the front legs. Heres what i came up with.

I need feedback on these cause i dont really have any ideas on where to go from here.

Spiders

Right, its done its working. He has an extendable neck he blinks and he moves.

So Matt hows it goin?

ookkkaayyy then....

My eyes sting - damned chlorine

Current Mood: Blergh!
Listening to: Hook Soundtrack - Smee's Plan

Looky, i found a tutorial on rubble

http://www.3dlessons.com/tutorials/Piles-Of-Rubble-36329.html

I havn't tried it out yet but it looks promising.

And ive started modelling the spider, i will hopefully get it finished tomorrow so Sarah can start rigging it either tomorrow or Tuesday.

What have you been doing today Matt?

Ive been modelling, thanks for asking.

First building done...ish will probs add more too it, will show the others tomorrow and see what they think and what they've done.

Lets step back in time.

Current Mood: Satisfied
Listening to: Corpse Bride - The Wedding Song

Righty boys and girls lets now take the time to sit down and do a little reflecting.

I've been kinda looking forward to this project and dreading it at the same time, the three months before the start of this project was mainly spent trying to find ways to save myself from insanity caused by boredom, so to get back to work was nice and refreshing. Yet upon reading the project brief i became very apprehensive, I'm not best at enviroments at the best of times and here was a project focusing on it...

The class then divided into groups me, Sarah and Dan teamed up. We commandeered Yaniv from team Authentic and Dan talked Khalid into working with us. Together we became Team Lunchbox.

We then took a couple of days to come up with some ideas each, most of my ideas were kinda unorigional and some were unpractical but thats what brainstormings all about.



My favorite idea out of the ones i came up with was an abandoned Victorian Circus. I even did a drawing.

Alas the idea was binned for being to complicated, ah well.
Other ideas i came up with -

The Mad Hatters Tea Party: I really liked this idea but it got didnt go anywhere cause it has been done so many times before.

GraveYard+Haunted House: These got shot down as soon as the words left my mouth.

An Office: If anything not challenging enough, you just need to design one cubicle then duplicate it several dozen times.

Battle Grounds: I think i forgot to mention this when giving ideas...

and an Abandoned City: Which we eventually went with, I think we all came up with this idea independently which is probably one of the reason it got chosen.

After sitting down for an hour ripping apart each others ideas we narrowed it down to a selection of two, a dressing room of a diva and a ghost town. The group was split Me and Dan wanting to do the dressing room and Yaniv and Khalid wanting to do the ghost town (Sarah looked uncomfortable with both ideas). Someone suggested we go away for the weekend and think about both ideas and then on Monday and make a decision.

So we went away and thought reconvened Monday and we decided that neither idea was going to work out. So we just decided there and then to go with abandoned city. Then that Wednesday we was up London viewing a Post Apocalyptic London exhibition in the Tate Modern.

As an exhibition i didn't really get it, it seemed that you needed to use your imagination to experience what the artist (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster) was trying to show. However in the exhibition turned out to be alot more useful than originally realised or intended.

All over the walls there were these spidery things with lights that changed colour and these are what inspired Sarah to come up with the idea of these things exploring the city. The reason these were dreamt up was because our enviroment was lax of any movement and the narrative we had come up with was entirely reliant on sound (A phone message of a woman). This was a tad annoying because both me and Yaniv had come up with scripts.

Phone: You have 1 new message received on Tuesday the 16th at 10.28am.
Shelly: Ken its me… listen I don’t know whats going on but the army’s here… they’re loading people into trucks… they say…they say we’re being evacuated…
4 minute warning siren starts wailing over the background noise.
Soldier: Everybody keep moving, single file…
Shelly: Hang on a sec…
Soldier Miss don’t stop moving.
Sounds of getting up into truck
Siren gets louder.
Shelly: Ken listen the trucks number plate is LH56 JGR. Find Me. I love y-
Phone: End of Messages

So we now have little spidery robot thingies in our enviroment which im really happy with because it gives us something to animate whereas before there was nothing outside of enviromental animation. (You've probably already seen the test i've done below this post)

Righty thats all i can think of at the moment. I'm gonna post some of my Barcelona pics soon as i get them up on photobucket (i've created an account for the group so we have somewhere to store our textures and references).

Matt

First Test

RRRRiiiggghhhtttyyyyy.....

Made a quick rig to try and see how these things will move, and this is what ive come up with.

Ta Da, Its only two legs on a side view, it hasnt been cleaned in any way and it slower than i imagine the actual things moving.

What u guys think???

Note 2self

Get PS back off Simon

I'm updating see...SEE

Right, i only got about 40 photos done before my camera decided to die...so heres the best of what i got.

I'm think the trip to London went well and i expect we'll end up going back up there at some point to gather more stuff.

I LIVE!!!!!!!!!

Testing 1, 2, 1, 2...

Apple Tango, Apple Tango...MARMITE!