Stuff occurred today

Lots has happened today. But i maybe have a film. Spoken to Caroline and Matt who gave me a variety of options to try get a story working and have it all make sense rather than the current animatic which is very dry and dull.
Matt suggested him losing something or going to the moon to find something to give him some purpose and have a satisfying ending rather than it just stopping as it does in its current form, so the plan is to introduce a backstory with his dad or someone being an astronaut and giving him his medal/Space Operations Badge (they really exist). Precious object goes missing, he sees a glint on the moon whilst gazing out of the window and thinks its the badge and jumps into his cardboard box rocket and warps... following old boards.... swapping crap alien for hunting for badge, finds, happy, returns home..... working on the rest.

Also i tested the character rig out today and that is what i want to change ^^ all the skinning is default so once ive gone and looked at it all and tweaked i think it'll work nicely except the hands which have been on the list to redo for a couple days but the priority is story

Feasability Testing 3: Facial Performance

Been thinking about the facial setup and animation a lot for this project, I wanted to go a step further from the 2nd yr group project and try something different. I spent a lot of time looking at Jason Osipa in the 2nd year maya option and rigged and animated accordingly which is something i'd like to go back to with the mouth and make sure i create all of the correct extreme shapes to link up into neater sliders later on rather than lists of blendshapes.

The approch to animating it and thinking in layers also helped lots and can be seen in the test below (2nd yr maya unit) trying not to do everything at once, thinking about the widest/up and down points, then accents in the head, eye darts etc and slowly build up the performance rather than try and do everything at once.


Facial Anim Tests from Stacie Hawdon on Vimeo.


The biggest difference this time round is the eyes, I wanted to test myself and do something other than semi realistic looking eyes and have more fun with the shapes - e.g Eve's eyes in wall-e and the button eyes in Coraline, simple shapes relying a lot on the brow to convey the emotion etc...

In terms of testing the faces range of movement im going to create a simple set of mouth/eye/brow shapes to work back into later on, looking at a broad range of "lip sync shapes" including Aardman, Preston Blair, Eve, and in a mirror to try and sculpt the best possible ones, I've found it easier to work straight into maya rather than draw everything out then translate to 3d, will post tests shortly

Feasability Testing 2: Cloth

Cloth Tests from Stacie Hawdon on Vimeo.

Testing possibilities of being able to animate clothing especially in the jump sequence, something to concider and develop further and look into nCloth and collision objects - making a more accurate inner body for the shirt to rest on and remving the edgind around the sleeves rather than its current extruded form

Feasability Testing

Im slightly concerned that a lot of my testing has been more technically based, the stories developed a lot and changed about 6 times since ive been nack but always been on a common theme with the world the boy enters through his visor and keeping the narrative very simple meant i had much more time to learn the tech and play around, also the presswure to produce 30 seconds of animation tests has meant modelling and rigging the boy earlier than anticipated, today ive unwrapped what i think is needing to be uv-ed textured at a later date to prevent any problems during rigging (incase i cant unwrap and have to re rig) lots learned, the head needs some work still to get a nice map but im contemplating keping the deisgn simple and just adding minor details like seams and logos to the t-shirt and shoes etc. Checked the model through meticulously this afternoon and everythings in place to attempt rigging and finally test out some animation :D

Animatic

is in progress, been getting feedback from various tutors/people on storyboards and what reads/doesnt so im working back into those whilst working out the animatic and whether any dialogue is req'd the general opinion is that it reads well with out...


Preproduction test animatic 1 from Stacie Hawdon on Vimeo.

Head mk2

but the body was cool...

... and sticking in some joints and testing the mesh worked switching between fk/ik and not changing the weights so when i go back and tweak those it'll look nicer

to say the head went bad is an understatement

i didnt like the mouth so decided to redo and broke the smoothness under the chin and neck.... 3 hours later and much help from Charlie we decided it would be best to redo and try and extract working elements like the ear and mouth.... long. day.