Car edited

just played around with it a little, I think it looks best in black.

Rigging in Process....

Finally found it in me to do some rigging, and it has been a good day, managed to rig my doctor, just need to size up the envelopes so that he doesn't look to drastically warped in places when I come to animate with him. on track and hopefully will finish off all rigging by the end of the week.

car (mark1)

Thought I would take a bit of a break from my project, a bad idea really considering time and all but hey, but i thought I would push my modelling skills and attempt to produce a car, I started following a tutorial but then kind of took it my own way. I used blueprints from a porshe carrera to get started and then made a few of my own alterations. I'm pretty happy for a 1st attempt but I know if I put more time into it i could get it looking really good.

glass texturing and lighing seminar

Romas seminar today on glass texturing using both scanline renderer and mental ray renderer, the picture is using mental ray renderer. We have been given a sheet with a tutorial on vray renderer which i plan to do some time over the next week.

Doc in scene

Just thought i would have a quick look at how Doctor Frank looks in the toy shop scene, I'm fairly happy, my only complaints are he is to shiny, will have to spend some time on his skin. The bunting around the room is also very flat, i think a bit of texture will be needed for these. 

Lots to do....

So it only really came to my attention the other day we have our hand in very soon, 13Th may to be exact, great timing for me to go off skiing for a week now!. I've realised along with this I have a lot of work to do. The listed work we need in the Brief is: The 3 minute animation, 10 pages of sketch work, Full storyboard and a journal of development (hoping this means our blogs) and a 500 word rational.
This is where I currently am at. All modelling is pretty much done, just a bit of work on environment. I need to rig my characters, animate, render, composite, edit and export. I have half the storyboard done and around 5 pages of sketches. I have also updated my blog regularly with my thoughts and development work. I come back from skiing on 16Th  and have 27 days till hand in. I'm going to do my best to work flat out on this so it will be done in time.

Exterior Shot1

yes peyman its dark, thats how its meant to be!

Alma the film

Awesome news that Dreamworks have announced they are going to produce a full feature length film on the Rodrigo Blass short 'Alma' an animation that i am heavily drawing influence from for my current Frankenstein project, also great news that it will be directed by the brilliant Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan's labyrinth and many more.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2010/10/guillermo-del-toro-alma-movie-animatied-dreamworks.html

Sound, Foley, Music

Since being at home I've found it hard to work on my project on my laptop, mainly because i'm used to having a big screen, a proper mouse and a faster running computer. i cant believe i did most of my past projects on this laptop. Anyway in order try  persevering with work i have decided to start collecting the sound and Foley for my animation as i have a strong sense of how i think it will look and turn out with the sound included in the whole piece. One of the really useful sites i found for simple sound effects such as creaky stairs,rustling, sawring and such like was sound Jay -http://www.soundjay.com/. all free as well. i also used youtube to try find a few sounds an ambient music which would fit but like with our material library we have started creating i would also like to start collecting my own sound library.

Pigeon: Impossible

This is a little animation i stumbled across done by a group of animators at a company called Martell animation, i tried finding a website for them but just found one under the Pigeon: Impossible name. Anyway what i like most about this short is the style and quality of the rendering. If you look closely, the texturing i think is awesome, i'm very fond of the clean, smooth style too. It also got me thinking about how within animation you can really go anywhere with a story, no narrative can be too crazy or unbelievable, as animation itself isn't reality, obviously you have to be able to connect with it in some way so it can not be completely off the rails but there is a sense that there can be no bounds in what happens in your story and how you pull this off. These a just rambling thoughts which you can choose to ignore or argue.....