Public Lavatories

Yep. That's right. Public lavatories.

Why? Well one of my most recent assignments is "My life in Falmouth." For this I've got to record someone and put animation to their speech and, of course, this must be someone who presently lives in Falmouth. I have the liberty to set the scene where ever I want, make the speaker what ever I want and choose the subject matter (as long as it relates to Falmouth.) As Falmouth is a very tourist orientated place there are public loos dotted around everywhere so I've decided to animate a couple of flys talking about the public bogs.
I've recently created a few concept sketches based on photos I took....yes I took photos of some bogs...and I've done the odd rough character sketches which are subject to change depending on what the speakers may sound like. You may find these drawings are easily more visible if you tilt your screen back a bit

...the scan was a wee bit tilted...

A rather flamboyant portrayal.

Just thinking of details and stuff.

I think I may need to simplify the character design but these are only rough so it'll probably change once I've got my recordings.

Anyway that's that. Maybe next time I'll upload a small preview of my little project. Scidodle!



Modeling, Animation, Stuff and Stuff

Ok I think this is going to be a shortish blog again.

In this modeling session I learnt how to put "joints" onto a 3D model and I had to apply these techniques onto a pair of simple skeletal hands I created like so.

Over all it was a relatively simple and intuitive process and now I can make 3D models that can be animated. Yay!

Anyway a bit of animation mumbo jumbo now. Over the Christmas holiday I came across an elephant animation rig and decided to animate it. There were two elephants in the scene. A mother and her calf but half way through the process the face of the calf collapsed and I had to stop....I think I may have some how deleted something important. I would have rendered what I've been able to do so far and put it on the blog but something weired is happening with the rendering option in Maya at the moment so I'll just ad some screen shots.

So many Nubes Curvs!

Nawwwww.

And those are the elephants. Anyway I'm also working on another little animation project of my own...again...but on top of that next week I'll be doing some hand drawn animation for a third year project and I'm referring to the traditional kind. Not flash. Eeep!

The Box

Hay I'm finally doing a blog about modeling.

Ok there's one thing I've discovered and that is I don't like modeling. I prefer to make them move. Seriously I don't think there's anything wrong with modeling (some people can do absolutely amazing stuff!) but I just don't find any enjoyment in it.

Anyway today I learnt about how textures can be applied to a three dimensional object in Maya. I learnt about the texture mapping and how to layer it onto an object.

The cereal box was originally blank then I applied the textures. The texture map is to the right.

This is the completed thing. An old school serial box! Yeah baby!

Talking Chalking

I'm starting to feel a little more confident in my abilities in drawing the human form. My sense for human anatomy is still terrible but it's better than it was.

In my last life drawing session I had to attempt to draw a life model on black paper with  white chalk so I had to consider how the lighting could express form instead of just drawing the main outline and then adding the shading.

This one is ok...ish but there is room for improvement.

Ok I'll admit that I'm actually kinda happy with this one but there are definitely things there that aren't quite right.

So basically I've just got to keep practicing as always. Anyway that's all for now dudes.

More on the Computer

Ok there's some After Effects stuff on this blog and a piece of Flash animation.

After Effects first. The task was to do a ten to twelve second piece which started and ended with a specific image. I think I've got a better understanding of how the program works (though every so often I find myself trying to use Maya key bored short cuts on it.) I don't feel quite as embarrassed to show this as I did with my last After Effects piece. As this little short had to begin and end with the same image I decided to sequence it in such a way that it could run in a loop.

Ooogle




My Flash work is a talking butch bulldog with the manly name Lola. The task was to make her (it is meant to be a her) mouth move in sync with speech. The range of mouth positions was limited. Important consonants such as n were missing.

I found I could compensate by using other positions such as using the "r" position for a "d" as the teeth were bared and the "e" position for an "a". Lola also had quite a distinct accent and uses elongated "aaaayys" ans "esssssss". I had to consider such things when animating. There's no point selecting an "o" position if the character says such a vowel as "au".
I feel that over all the timing is more or less ok (but not fantastic) though I do feel that I ended up creating too much movement.

Apparently next time we get to draw our own characters and lip sync them. Yay!


Lola Lip Sync




So that's Lola. Any thoughts and feed back would be much appreciated as always.