Ape Contour Rendering

A couple of contour renders of my ape model to show the mesh:

Peter has a problem

For the pitch project I teamed up with Loz, Miguel, Grethe. The project didn't get off to the best of starts as i was away for the first week for my brothers wedding in Italy. 

Anyway once i was back and had caught up with the negotiated brief i started to get on with the pitch. The practice pitch wasn't expected to go very well (not for me anyway) as there wasn't a lot of progress to show them. This had us behind the other groups so we had to majorly re think our idea and get on with the presentation and pitch bible. We didn't get another chance for a rehearsal as there wasn't enough time amongst other projects so we had to turn up early on the day to go over it all so we all knew what we were doing and if any questions were asked we would be prepared to answer them. 

On the day i had the job of looking after the slideshow and making sure the correct slides were up on screen relevant to the talk. I also made the pitch bible (was given the images) and designed the layout, composition and the typography, i took this role as i thought id put my graphics background to a bit of use. The bible came out looking nice and simple but also direct to the point which is what i was after.

Here is the bible and our idea:

Finished Model, Long John Silver Back Ape

This is the final model of the Long John Silver Back Ape character for 'Doodles' my negotiated brief project. I feel overall it turned out really nicely, I would say there is enough detail in the model itself but just needs to be textured and posed for the poster, although I have a fully textured sword which il put up if i can find it.. As its hand in day tomorrow I don't think there is enough time to UV unwrap the whole model and then texture it as id need till the end of the week at least, especially for the fur as I would need to do a few tests on it to get it right =( I will carry on with it after the hand in though as id love to see it complete and I can imagine it would look pretty good as well. As for putting it into pose, well I've attempted it but it just looks weird... it may start to look okay at one angle then I turn it around and its all messed up in another perspective so it makes it harder to get the next limb in the right place, could maybe do with a couple more pictures for reference of the pose. At the end of the day though im very happy with the final outcome especially as the only creature iv modeled before was a low poly count fish so this is quite the opposite! With enough practice on creatures I think I may start to sway a bit more towards it over machines but as it stands machines are still my prefered choice to model.
There wasn't really any problems I encountered with the process of this model other than one or two mis-judgements of the reference pictures causing the face to look a bit strange but with a little guidance from Derek I managed to get it back on track soon enough.

More WIP Ape

Some more WIP for my negotiated brief project, nearly there now, just a bit more modeling to do and add the hat and sword then onto texturing. Looking alright so far. Iv found it quite a challenge modeling a creature to a machine and if im honest i think i prefer modeling machines but im not sure if its due to me being used to it? Maybe i should try and model a few more creatures over summer?

Negotiated WIP

Here is some more WIP for my negotiated brief project, I have started to add in the clothes now and have added the strap, false leg and crutch. I have also adjusted the stucture of the head a little bit as well which also looks a lot better. The eyes were a bit of a nightmare until I actually sat down and thought about how they should look so i ended up constructing an eye socket for the eye to attach to. I like the look of it so far and with a few days left I think i can have it complete in time.

Negotiated brief

Here is some WIP of the Ape i am modeling for this project. I like how it has turned out so far and am excited to see the finished model but there are a few tweaks to make around the neck as it looks a bit stretched but can easily be sorted, must say he has pretty good balance!.. Here is where i got up to yesterday:

After looking back at it now im not too sure about the eyes as they look like they are bulging out a bit but i think this is due to the position and shape of the eyeball itself.

Projected History.

Yesterday was a very hectic day. As i will be away for a week as of monday i thought i would try and get as much work done for my negotiated brief as possible as i do not have Maya on my laptop to work on whilst away. Around mid day i noticed Simon was in the studio and could see he needed some help to finish up the project so i offered my assistance as we had all put a lot of time and effort into this project i wanted it to be complete. So my negotiated project was put on hold for the rest of the day so i could help Simon with the editing, final recordings and renders of the project which seemed to go on for ever. Things were going constantly wrong such as renders being to large to burn to disc or not playing, sound being completed distorted and unusable on the renders etc. We ended up having to use a P2 camera to record the final mock up piece which was a print out of the house (instead of a projection onto the real building) in a VR suite as it needed to be shown in context otherwise there would have been no point in it all. We could really start to feel the tension at around 8:00pm as it still was unfinished and the never ending wait for the computers to finish rendering was really starting to worry us. The studio managed to stay open for an extra half an hour for everyone to have that little bit more time, luckily for Simon and I we managed to get at least a rough render finished in time and even the TIF sequence was completed meaning that there was something to hand in with the bio and the press pack. We were kicked out at 9:30, so i had been in the studio for over 12 hours that day. This was definitely a new pressure level for me as i knew what it meant to him but I feel we handled it extremely well and managed to get extremely close to completion!

Negotiated WIP

Heres todays work of the ape. So far so good, all the geometry seems to be okay and the character is clearly starting to come together. I dont think its too bad for about 7 hours work =)

'Doodles' modeling

Received my turn a rounds today of my character for the negotiated brief project. Im excited to get started on it as i find modeling really relaxing and happily keeps me occupied for hours. Looking at the turn a rounds i can clearly see i have also picked the most difficult character so should be a nice challenge for me, this will also be the first natural creation for me to make in maya as im used to modeling mechanical objects im not sure how this will go but im hopeful =). Will get started on it first thing tomorrow and hopefully have it complete (minus texturing) by the end of the week with some long days. (Watermarked just incase)

Cinematography

Here is our final cut for this project. We opted for black and white as it seems to fit the genre better and looks more aery although i do like the colour version also. I really enjoyed this project as it was fun to be filming in a reasonably large group and working as a team. Everything seemed to fit into place in terms of editing so it made life a bit easier for Miguel and I, we sourced our sounds from freesound.org apart from the slam which was our own recording and the ambient sound track was from the internet.
Anyway heres the finished article, nice job guys =)

Post pro tests

Here is a couple of fire test i produced for the post production project. As you can see these work a lot cleaner than the final edit of fire. It just annoyed me as i know i can do it =(. The final edit looked odd because the bounding box was moved as well as the emitter so it just gave the effect of a moving image. It should have looked a bit more like this even though this isnt perfect either: (also the videos exported at a funny frame rate, they shouldnt be this slow...)

Post Production hand in

We finally finished this project today with literally 5 minutes to spare... It looks okay ish but i really do not like the dodgy effect with the fire fluids as the bin takes off, it just looks a bit rubbish really as the fire stops moving. I think this is due to moving the whole box rather than just the two emitters. Also the second bin looks a bit bland as it attempts to fly as i wanted it to bob a bit like an animated helicopter would but i really had no time left as the rendering needed to be done.
I did like my modeled bins as i can see my modeling improving and this was also done at the start of the term so my skills have improved more since as well. There have been a couple of things i can take away from this project:
-Basic rigging and weight painting
-Texture unwrapping using roadkill
-Apply fluids to meshes
The tracking was done nicely but we did spot a few mistakes near the end as you could actually see the original bins behind =( this would have needed rotoscoping to get sorted but there wasnt enough time for this, this did let it done a little.
I liked the concept of this project and it could have turned out really nicely but the time management was just too poor to produce anything spectacular.

Post Production WIP

I have finally got back on track with our post production workshop and have near enough finished texturing now, give or take a couple of smoothing niggles. I think it looks pretty cool at the mo and the only thing im not too sure about is the shineyness of the arm as it looks to be too different from the bin in terms of texture.
Work so far:

Post pro progress

Some more progress on this creation of ours. Starting to take shape now and the arm has a nice simple skeleton to move around and as shown there doesnt seem to be any kinks which is always good. Im very happy with this so far, just need to texture the bin now!

Post pro arm

This is the claw/arm for our bin in our post production project. This is just for reference of scale, close up texture and the claw itself. It looks okay but maybe a bit too shiny and light but can be easily edited when put into the final scene.

Maya water research

Iv been looking into water textures and caustics in Maya and stumbled across these two (two clips in one video). These were basically presets in maya but i thought were relevant as research. Anyway, looks good:

Water

Heres a little test iv done trying to create water without caustics. This image below was made by applying a texture to a directional light projecting on a plan and also placing a fog in front of it to form the foggy blue. I placed a cube into the scene and it does give the effect of being under water BUT it took literally 2 seconds to render a frame instead of the 3+minutes it took to render the caustics. I reckon we could easily get away with this as it does look very effective and the shadows work well aswell.

Composite/Cinematography

Here is an idea we had for our cinematography. We were thinking of having our protagonist and villain in colour and leaving the background black and white for effects. It is just an idea and we will see where it goes but i think it would look pretty cool if we could do it.

This was an experiment we done in Georgs Workshop, we was looking at keying a character (not very neat in this example) and having it go behind an object from a photo and adding some lens blur. I took it a little bit further by taking the colour out of the background for this effect.

Projected History WIP

Here is some seaweed under water made for Simon's 3rd year project. It was the first time i have made foliage before but i feel it looks okay. It is going to be fairly small as well (i think) but it works, i also added some 'fur' to the base of the plant to make it look like algi which i think it does okay and also added a plan with some bump mapping and noise. The pictures below (in no certain order) show development of the scene and what it looks like with out the algi etc.

projected History: Machine House

Some more Projected History work to show. This time iv been asked to make a simple model of a machine house so here is the outcome. Didnt take too long to make, maybe an hour? Anyway does the job and i quite like it =) It is going to be used as another background model so there wasnt much need for detail the wheels will also rotate when put into the production piece.