I realise I've been useless at blogging lately, but I plan to blog everything over summer, as I am really interested in character animating.
Last week I handed in my last project and I am now done until September, however there's no rest for the wicked! I'm currently learning character animating in Maya. I'm using the Morpheus rig to learn, thanks to Josh Burton, which is a really nice rig to start with. I've also had fun 'making my own Morphy' from video:
At the minute I'm playing around with the face rig. However, before I sleep tonight I'm going to plan a story and do a few sketches for a small animation. Which I will blog sometime this week.
I also want to learn a lot more in After Effects, which I will do when find something inspiring to make. Anyway, I will keep blogging as much as I can, it'll be good to look back at this when I'm working in industry.
Sorry I haven't posted, not been up to my usually blogging (ha ha). I'm currently working on a compositing project which involves multi-pass rendering and colour correction. There are two sections to the brief, so I will post some screen shots on Monday when everything is up to scratch.
When I have completed this project I will be focusing on character animating in Maya, drawings - developing a portfolio sketch book and researching as much as I can for the research project, for next year. I have four months to learn as much as I can and I am determined to do it!! Especially Maya. I will also be entering every 11second club over summer and I can't wait to get started.
For the Architectural Environmental Design project, we had to
produce a 60 second walk through from a chapter of a book of your choice. This
included designing, modelling, texturing, lighting and rendering using 3Ds Max.
It was important to study the architecture styles, mood and genres of the scene
you are creating.
For the project I researched many production designers and
visualisation artists to gather
inspiration for creating my own scene. I have always admired production
designer Patti Podesta. I researched his work
after watching the film Love and Other
Drugs. Now he has gone into
designing TV shows than films. I also admire the production designer John Shaffner
who designs for TV shows such as The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men.
Although these two designers don’t relate to my style of work for this project,
they have inspired me to use some of the techniques that I see within their own
work.
When attending the first seminar for this project I knew straight
away Flowers In The Attic By Virginia Andrews would be a great book to use for
this project, especially the chapter where the children find the attic because
there is so much you can imagine and feel from that particular chapter.
They produced a film of Flowers in the Attic which I have got on
DVD, but I kept well away from it as I wanted to create and imagine the design
and architecture myself.
Therefore I started looking at different types of attics and how
the roof fit with the particular styles of architecture. I then began to sketch
my own ideas from my imagination of what I believed the attic would look
like. The objects in the attic came from
the chapter of the book so therefore I found related images for these objects which
I could use to help me when modelling. I also thought about the composition of
how the objects would be laid out within the scene.
In seminars, we learnt how to model simple architecture to quite
complex architecture from reference images. We also looked into the history of
architecture, which I found very useful when designing the plan of the attic.
Lighting was also something we learnt within the seminars which I found very
beneficial, it helped me understand the types of lighting and exposure you
could use within your scene.
I started building the plan of the attic and then using my
reference images to start modelling the objects for my scene.. Throughout the
process of this project I thought the most difficult part was the lighting. For
some reason the rendering was showing up with the lights in the scene, but I
managed to fix the problem in the end.
If I worked on this project again, I would improve the textures
within the scene and make the environment look a lot more aged than it already
does. I would also added subtle lights to bring minor detail to the surrounding
objects.
I have learnt a lot from this project and realised that you have to
spend a lot of time on visualisation to get the result you want, such as
texturing and lighting. However I believe
I have developed my skills further, especially in lighting which I will
continue to use and expand on in my future projects.
Here are a few rendered stills from my project:
Sorry I haven't blogged much this month, I've been super duper busy with deadlines. I'm currently working on the second visualisation project which is due in this Friday. I'll blog some test renders for you all later.
I also entered the 11secondclub.com last month and I got some constructive feedback. Which I am taking into account when animating.
Over the summer I'm going to learn character animating in Maya, Digital Tutors will help me do this. I will also research as much as I can for the research project for next year.
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