Week 50

Matchmoving with Leigh Russel

working with autodesk match mover, the week was used to give a basic overview on match moving, we also learned some about HDRI and lighting without lights.

The assignment for the week was to track a small piece of footage and then add a character. For the character I decided to use the rubber chicken I did in the spring so I added a quick rig so that I would be able to animate it just a little bit, and with this awesome result - who needs animators;)

- what is lurking in the hospital basement? a slightly deranged rubber chicken,

if you ever meet him - RUN! as if you life depends on it -

- a screen shot from one of the smaller assignments in match mover -

Trailer Project

- the final result of the trailer project -

- not really a part of the trailer project, but I decided to do a little turn around of my character -

Week 47-49

Light, render and composit with Max Böhm

So the final three weeks of the trailer project. The first two weeks we worked closed together with the animators. Attending dailies and basically acting as directors, while at the same time fixing our rigs when they broke down or making small adjustments to them when needed.

While the animators worked on bringing our characters to life we started finishing up the final textures, matte paintings and what ever still needed to be done.

As the different shots where finished we could get started lighting them, and get started on rendering, on this project we had access to a renderfarm, it worked quite nicely and it definitely made life easier for us.

Just after finishing the trailer, early Friday morning, watching the final result for the first time - it was already obvious to us that there where things that could have been better, but as Max said you will never reach a 100% on any given project and we where out of time.

Still I'm really pleased with the final result - it turned out great.

some work in progres

just some random stuff from the trailer project - it should all be over very soon, and it is looking good. The animators have now done their part and so we "only" need to light, render and composit everything - no biggy....

- we needed a picture for the bedroom scene so here they are; the nipple twisting gals -

- a watercolor sketch I did that is used as a mattePainting -

- some test renders done while lighting the scenes -

- the title that is used in the end of the "movie", since it is supposed

to be an action trailer the style of thefont needed to reflect that -

Week 44-46

Rigging with Nico Sangrajka

Almost three weeks of rigging. It started out fine, and I felt like all was going well, as more and more where added to the rig I slowly felt I like I lost sight of what I was doing and why.

2½ week weren't really enough and I could easily have spent more time adjusting the rig, painting better skin weights and adding even more blend shapes, giving the animators a wider range of possible expressions.

- a couple of screen shots of the rig -

1.& 2. of November

Film Analysis with Stig Kulset

We where treated to a couple of different films starting out with "Blue Velvet" followed by "The Piano", "The New World" and finally first episode of "The Singing Detective".

This was all films I had never seen before and it is always nice getting new experiences, I especially liked "Blue Velvet", the best out of the four. By showing us "The New World" Stig was playing a mean trick on us - that movie is simply awful, the worst part about it was that he knew this - and still made us endure almost 2½ hours of movie hell.

But all things aside it was actually quite nice with a little break from the trailer project.

Week 43

Environment modelling with Jericho Green

This week we started modelling the final props, settings and environment - replacing all the blocks with the finished and much more detailed models, getting even closer to how everything should look in the end.

We also looked at what had to be done in 3D due to paralax, and what could be done in 2D - like mattepaintings.

I spent a lot of my time this week on one asset, the car that I've modelled and UV'ed - I would have liked it to be even better but my modelling skills are still improving and I didn't have more time since we had to move on to other stuff - so maybe I'll refine the model later. For now this will have to do - and since we do not see that much of the car in close up I think it'll be just fine...

The car is modelled after a VW beetle, since all the characters are insects.

- a screenshot of the car i did-

Week 39-41

Modelling and Texturing with James Stone

We modelled our characters, UVed them and textured them. From the beginning the idea was that we also should model all of our props as well - this turned out to be too much, but we managed to make some of them, the rest will have to wait for later.

My character is Jules, the Austrian guy from the movie - we couldn't really figure him out in the design process so he is bit of a mixture of a ladybug and a wood louse. I've tried to make this character my own, even though I didn't do the final design - and I'm quite pleased with the final result.

- some screen shots of Jules -

- another concept done in Illustrator -

- a quick concept/environment design I did in Illustrator for the trailer project -

Week 37-38

3D animatic with Cyrille Caron

Here we start to take our 2D animatic into 3D, trying to figure out how to best frame every single shot. Deciding on what camera angle, focal length etc. we want to use. All of this is done using very simple build characters and sets, since the focus at this stage isn't on great animation or beautiful light settings and so on, but more on the actual layout. I think we went through three or four versions on the animatic, small changes that had to be made from one to the other; here you can see the first and the final version, even though we have already talked about some minor changes that might need to be made, things like tweaking the timing of the sound etc.

At this stage all the wünderfull animation was done by the CGA part of the group, later when the proxy models have been replaced with the finished 3D models - the animators will help us out and hopefully make some awesome animation - making this great trailer complete.

- The final version -

- A background Image I did for the final shot, digital paint and collage done in Photoshop -

- first version of our 3D animatic -

- a couple of screen shots of the character, Catherine that I "modelled" for the animatic -

- Some screen shots from the first version of the 3D animatic -

- the final image, rendered using Illustrator -

- the concept sketch of the fisherman -

week 35-36

Story Boarding und Character Design mitt Uwe Heidschötter und Christian Puille.

And since that is about as much german as I speak, we'll continue in english. It has been a couple of great weeks, with plenty to do. We had to figure out what story we wanted to tell, and which images we would use to tell that story. Then we had to draw the story board, design the characters, and finally make an animatic.

- the 2D animatic for our Jules ét Jim trailer prj. -

- color script for the trailer, the images where later used for the animatic -

- some rough sketches I did for our character designs -

2nd Year

The Trailer Project. A group project that will last the entire third semester.

Each group is given a classic film they have to re-artdirect and the create a 30 sec. long trailer for it. For this project we will also be working with the animators, as they will animate our characters for us. I am in group with Nikki ( http://n-starostka.blogspot.com/ ) and Fie ( http://a-tholander.blogspot.com/ ) and we will be working on Francois Truffauts "Jules ét Jim", it's a story of two best friends who falls in love with the same woman, Catherine. Since the movie is rather slow paced and with a lot of talk-talk-talk, we've decided to make our trailer more action packed, taking some of the more interesting scenes out of their context, cutting them together into something that hopefully looks a bit more entertaining. Furthermore our three characters will be modelled as insects, with a somewhat flat looking background, like sets on a stage.

- i taught i taw a putty tat -

steam train

Not having worked a lot with 3D during the summer I decided it was time to a little brush up.

- here are a couple of wire frame renders of the final result-

-"The Joint Tree"-

The idea came during a rigging class in the spring where the term joint tree came up. The mental image was there immediately, so I quickly drew a sketch, and now finally got a finished image. Done in Illustrator.

- another piece of Illustrator-summer work -

- Ollie the Owl&Willie the (book)worm -

I used Illustrator for this one

week 23

Exam week

for the exam we had to make a translation from some 2D artwork into 3D. Build the low-poly model in Maya, then bring the model into Mudbox to get a high poly version, or a normal map that then could be applied to the low poly version. The final result could have been a lot better had my planning been just a little bit better. But since I was a bit insecure as to how much time was needed for Mudboxing I ended up planning to much time for this part of the assignment, leaving less time to create a proper base mesh.

-model with normal map applied-

- low-poly version-

Week 22

Concept development with Peter Chan.

This was a truly great week. A ton of new information to take in. But with a totally committed and very positive person to teach us the week went by to quickly.

We were each given two random pictures or images that should be used as a foundation for creating one character, one creature and one environment that all should fit together, into one "moment" as the final outcome of the week.

On top on all this Peter tried to get all of us to step out of our own comfort zone, meaning we should try to design/draw in a manner we where not to familiar with.

- And this is really hard, I tried to use more details in my design, since I usually keep my characters relative simple, but in the end the final result wasn't that far away from what I would call my own style or comfort zone.

In general I wasn't that pleased with the outcome, but I just have to see it as part of a process - and then if I can find the time during the summer break, maybe I'll go back for a short revisit.

-sketch for the final moment-

-sketches of the character-

-different thumbnails-

Week 21

- a couple of sketches I did of our two French teachers, Paolo and Daniel-

Digital Painting

We where introduced to both digital painting(or matte painting), in for instance Photoshop and camera projections in Maya, that being a way to use a matte painting in a 3D environment. Both subjects really interesting but unfortunately it didn't seem to be that well planned and with all that new information in just one week it turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment to me.

I had really been looking forward to this week, so hopefully this is not the last time that digital painting is on the schedule.

Week 18-20

Animation & Rigging with André Bergs

We started out with one week of animation - in order to get a better understanding of how a proper rig should work, and just made a couple of small animation exercises; bouncing ball, tentacle, tentacle playing with ball and for the grand finale we animated to a piece of music. Animating a character to our own little bit of music - and in the end it was all put together.

For the rigging we could choose between a standard character to rig or we could use or own. In order to keep it a bit simpler for myself I chose the standard character, which I think was a good idea - since there where more than enough (minor) problems.

And lots of new things to take in, gimball lock, rotation order(Switzerland&the axis of evil) and remembering to keep a decent naming convention on all the joints and controllers - to avoid getting to confused.

- I did manage to complete the basic rig, and I also had the time to ad some rotation-correction-joints in both arms. The IK/FK switch for the arms I didn't get around to.

-a sketch of our teacher-

-some screen shots of the rig-

RenderBird

- During this week I had a brief encounter with the most illusive render bird...it only appears on your desk, while...rendering -

Week 17

Render & Presentation with Anna Kubik
This week was all about rendering and putting together a presentation of the entire character project - all the way from the beginning. So putting together inspirational images, early sketches, final design and images and turn around of the final character, in both an AO rendering, wireframe and beauty render. And some close ups of certain details on our model we where pleased with. I never finished this part of the assignment due to render problems, or to put it in another way - it took way to long time to get my images out of Maya...

-I later redid, or re-cut the presentation since I wasn't entirely satisfied with the first result, so what is shown here is version 2.0

Week 16

- a couple of renders of my character; wireframe, AO and beauty+AO -

Thanks to Iceland and a certain volcano, eyafjallajökull - Adam was stuck in Viborg for another week, probably not the worst for any of us - since most of us still needed to do a lot of modelling.

Week 14-15

Modeling with Adam Dewhirst
Spend the last couple of weeks modeling my character, and I actually think it's turning out quite nicely. Been using Maya and for the first time Mudbox, which is a really nice program. So one more week to go, I've got to model the final props, tweeking a few vertexes and whatnot - I'm really hoping I'll have enough time to texture my character - it would really add a lot to it - right now i looks a bit like a hollow plastic chicken...

- my character so far, Maya&Mudbox -

Week 12

- so this is Clucky McNugget, the worlds best chicken hypnotist -

Marquette sculpting with Damon Bard
Started out with printing my design from last week, using the sketch mainly as reference, minor changes naturally occured, for instance the neck became a bit shorter which made the character seem more appealling. I feel like (chicken tonight) trying to turn a drawn sketch into a clay model really helped me in getting a better understanding on how the character worked. So now I might even go back and make some adjustments to the drawn design.

Week 11

- the final modelsheet as it turned out -

- some sketches i did during the week -

- small sketchs of Viking on a scooter, from one of the smaller assignments of the week -

Character Design with Craig Kellman
The assignment of the week was to create a non-human biped, that in the following weeks will be sculpted, both as a marquette and in 3D using Maya and Mudbox. With no real limitations to the project I found it hard to decide on what to do, so I ended up creating a naked/roasted chicken that is also a hypnitist/magician.

- a small sketch I did of Craig Kellman-

Random stuff

-Postcard from Vegas -

I've used photoshop and Illustrator for this one

- photoshop&Maya, the eye texture was painted in photoshop -

- Batman vs. Superman-

Don't know why, but I really like Batmans expression. Done in Photoshop

Timelapse result of the LnR project

So this is the result of the LnR project; what started out as a 50ties kind of kitchen - inspired by the wallpaper texture I found, in the end turned into a dollhouse...I used some depth blur in order to give the impression of a doll house/miniature set....go for the full screen mode in order to see it proberly. On this project I worked with Maya, and for the compositing I used Fusion.

Timelapse - LnR project from martin hjelholt brun pedersen on Vimeo.

- still shot from the timelapse -

- AO -