Texture Test...

Rough Pajama Shirt Texture

This is the beginning of the texture stage for Katies pajama shirt. Just laid down the foundation colours exactly as they are from our final model sheet. I even used the same bunny and flower patterns. So I'm trying my hardest to stick to the final model sheet as much as possible.

Applied Pajama Shirt Texture (Test)

Modeled by Marc Dagatan and UV'd by Jitesh Thakolal. Just some rough texturing for the shirt to see how it would look. Works fine but just some problems with the seams on her sides that cause a bit of stretching and distortion. Not too much of a problem.

Rough Hair Texture

The hair was giving us a lot of trouble simply because of all the different shaped hair strands. After they were UV'd again where the cutting around the edge gave betters results, I rustled up this pile of mess just to test how it would look and clearly show if the UV's matched up properly.

Applied Hair Texture (Test)

Here I did a very rough hair texture with some darker highlights. Can't really see too much of the effect but will work more on it later.

Butterfly Modelling...

Butterfly Model

Used a pipe to model the body. Then used a pipe to model one antenna, a sphere for one eye, a plane for one wing, and pipes for three legs which where all special duplicated for the other side.

This is probably the only thing that I've modelled through the whole project because everyone had already gone crazy modelling everything else.

Butterfly Expression

After I made the wing pivots snap to the most inner wing edges closest to the body I then created an expression for the left wing, linking the x rotation to the right wing. But I made this expression influence the negative value of the right wing rotation so that it would rotate the opposite direction of the left wing. This was to make it easier for the wings to flap when animating.

Final Animatic...

This is our final animatic. Everyone was pretty happy with how it turned out. There is some sound in the end scenes to illustrate the effect we are aiming for.

Final Animatic

The timing is a bit speedy for me personally but it was necessary to fit within our given time frame. We may have to extend more time at the end since there is near to no animation in those scenes.

Final Storyboards...

Here are a few images of our final storyboard. These helps visualize the flow of story in more detail and also our desired camera angles for each shot.

 Final Storyboards (Partial)

We have a total of 23 shots/ scenes. Everyone seemed okay with the composed shots so we'll be following this layout throughout production. Although highly unlikely, minor changes may be applied later in production.

Schedule...

Now that Katie has a final design we're moving on to the modelling phase, which will be done by Marc Dagatan.

Image Plane References

I modified Katies model sheet to further help the modelling process in Maya by having Katie in a T-pose, ready to be used in the image planes. Side view has no arm simply because the front view already has enough information to model the arm. Made extra arm references for the top view for a better visualization of the hands and fingers.

These are a few thumbnails of the character design process.

Rough Thumbnails

These first lot are a bit crazy with different proportions, sizes and shapes. Got carried away with the experimenting here.

Refined Thumbnails

These thumbnails were just more refined to what we already knew we wanted in terms of body type and size. Nice, clear, consistent silhouettes all holding enough visual information to conceive various character concepts. I like thumbnail #11 for its simplicity.

Production Schedule

This is our Production Schedule to help us keep on track with the tasks at hand. The group has been all over the place lately because its the first time for many of us working on a production. Hopefully this will help us find a more structured process for this assessment.

Final Character Design...

I was put in charge of drawing up the final model sheet because the group felt that the previous bunny concept I'd drawn up was more or less what we wanted. So I began the long process of refining Katie's design.

Rough Construction

Here I re-evaluated her proportions from the previous bunny concept making her head more dominant than before. Her arms and legs shortened and slightly more chubby. Legs aren't as extremely bent and more slicked down to fit an anime-ish style.

Rough Sketch

I gave her a slightly more rounded face. Hair has been smoothed out more and not as detailed as the concept. Her arm sleeves have been rolled up as per previous suggestions.

Clean Up

Nice clean lines for a more tidy look, ready for colouring.

Grayscale

Grayscale helps with colouring by adding the foundation of tonal values. This way I don't have to shade and colour at the same time. All the shading and basic lighting is taken care of here.

Colour

Here are a few colour variations. The one good thing about anime is that characters can be very colourful. I personally like the dark colours on #4.

Final Turn Around

This is Katie's final look. No extreme change from the initial purple bunny pajamas concept but I guess its because everyone had already become attached to that design. It definitely works with our story and certainly feels like it fits Katie's personality. I reckon this design is 'not too generic' and 'not too unrecognizable' for the audience.

Hopefully it dodges all the modelling and rigging problems we're hoping to avoid.

Rough Character Design...

Here are a few rough concepts I drew up on Photoshop for our main character, Katie. We all pitched in to figure out what she could look like. Since our character will be waking in what seems to be a dream world of sorts, the group suggested that her clothing be that of bedtime attire to give it a more familiar dream-ish feel.

Nightie Concept

This is an idea from group member Zack Monga. Leaning towards a more simplified look of the character wearing a one piece nightgown or an over sized white shirt to match the setting, with rolled down white socks. The baggy-ness of the nightie/shirt could be a bit complicated to emulate in Maya.

Casual Concept

This is a my own concept. Dark hair, large shirt with blue sleeves, tight shorts and bare feet. Quite boring to be honest. More of a style and proportion test.



Bear Suit Concept

This concept consists of a full body bear suit complete with a hoodie with ears and a pair of piggy shoes. Has very loose leggings that tighten at the ends and loose arm sleeves.

Although it somewhat has a cuteness factor to the design (minus the weird colour scheme), the modelling process as well as the animation for the folds and the head movement within the hoodie could present more than a few problems for us 3D first timers. So we decided against this design altogether.

Bunny Pajamas Concept

I think a majority of the group liked this concept. Much contributions here from Hope Morgan and Marc Dagatan. This costume is composed of nice purple pajama set with a pair of pink bunny slippers. Her hair is brown with a slight part in her fringe, side bangs and a very short ponytail. She also has green yellow-ish eyes.

The only thing that would be changed to this design would be the long sleeves. To avoid dealing with complicated wrinkles around the elbow area, we've decide to roll her sleeves above the elbows.

The group agreed that Katie would have a very stylized look influenced by anime elements. This is to hopefully capture a sense of innocence and cuteness through the use of large eyes and a larger proportioned head.

Mood Board...

Mood Board

Compiled images to draw inspiration from and help us get a fair idea of what we want to produce during this project. The group seemed to resonate towards something similar in style and feeling as a Japanese animated film "Oblivion Island". It has a nice, cute, soft nature to everything in that film that the entirety of the group would like to aim for.

Rough Animatic...

This is a very rough animatic of our basic story edited together in After Effects from previous storyboards. I had to modify and cut a few of the intro scenes because they took up too much time and didn't really add much to the overall story. I also did very basic timing which will be more refined in the final animatic.

Happy Endings (Rough Animatic)

We pitched this to the tutors and got quite a positive response along with some positive feedback. Our story was clear and straight forward even though it lagged a wee bit in the middle of our presentation due to technical issues. The only things that were highly recommended was to delete a few scenes near the end. They found that the mid shot where Katie is lying on the bed was unnecessary and the end shot where the spikes flat line. Tutors recommended that it might have a better impact if we use only sound for the flat line because we've already established whats actually happening from showing Katie in the bed. Tutors were also concerned with how the objects would grow and materialize and suggested we try some animation tests to figure it out.

Now after we implement those tiny changes to the storyboard we have to finalize Katie's character design and further plan what objects will be appearing within the dream sequence.

Storyboard...

My rough storyboard as per brief. Very basic camera shots and scene setup. This was just a bit of practice for me to solidify more on what our story really is about. Will elaborate more on dynamic camera angles and shots when we put together our the final storyboard.

Storyboards

Even though a ongoing work in progress, that's basically our story in short. All shots will have the camera focal lengths of 35.000.

Group Project Begins...

Group projects have arrived! We are at our fourth and final term for the year, which will include 8 weeks of creative collaboration between 6 of us individuals.

The brief states that we are to produce a short animated film roughly within a time frame of 1 minute and 10 seconds. Even though I've been away for 3 days, the group came up with a workable story that everyone seemed to draw towards and agreed to develop.

Logline - A young girl discovers comfort in an imaginary world where her creativity comes to life. But things are more than they seem....

A young girl awakens into a world that seems to be an endless white space. Upon discovering a sketch book she draws a tree with a tire swing that miraculously materializes within this blank canvas world. As she strolls along towards the tree, her drawings continue to gain life and appear before her. She creates things varying from colorful trees, strange flowers to gigantic candy and beautiful butterflies. She continues on to a bridge that begins to build itself as she crosses. When she steps off the bridge to the other side she begins to cough and suddenly becomes ill. The sketch pad drops to the ground as she continues to stumble towards the tree. She reaches out to the tree but her vision becomes blurred. She falls to the ground.

That's all I'll explain for now. Further information of the story will be revealed in future posts.

The purpose of this story is for the audience to experience more of an emotional journey where, hopefully, they will become more familiar with the events as the story nears the end.

 No doubt there will be plentiful disagreements for everyone will have their own vision along the way. But that comes with being part of a group and trying to meet somewhere in the middle. I'm positive that we can work through our differences and get this project done.

I personally think our story has a very solid foundation that we can build on. I just needs a bit more refining and tweaking. Very excited for the weeks to come.

Stay tuned...