Hand in week

Its the deadline this week and its been quite the push to get everything done. My animations aren't finished but I think I've done a good bit of work on them so as least they will be ready for final show. I've been getting all my PPD research work printed and organised and it really takes longer than I thought but I think I will get everything finished. My script, storyboards and animatic are already done for work related and I have written up my work on the rabbit animation too. I've pretty much finalised my robot animation now, there will be a lot of rockets flying around and lasers going off. On my group animation with Gareth we have got our creature nearly finished, it took a bit longer than we expected but that is mainly because of all the other stuff we have had to do. I've uploaded some examples and tests of both animations.

smoke trails

while creating my pyrocluster smoke trails for my animation I was looking for tutorials and found this, in the end it wasn't what I wanted and I had to get the settings right on my own, but its a fairly good tutorial on a smoke trail.

SpeedTree

I've wanted to upload this for a while now, because its one of most impressive 3D programs I've seen. Speed tree lets your create trees, with varying quality very quickly and ready textured, there are a lot of pre-sets for different variety's of tree and plants. Speed try has its own working physics engines for trees and branches can break off under different tolerances. Speed tree is used in both games and films, a bigger example of this is avatar, in which all the vegetation and plant life was made using speed tree, or at least a lot of it, in gaming "Homefront" used speedtree, as do a lot of other games, but using the software costs thousands. With speed try the branches and trunks can just be drawn in but clicking in 3D space. This video is a good example of what it can do, showing a high detail tree being drawn, and then showing the physics working on it.

Updates

I've had a number of posts typed up ready to upload for a while, but annoyingly blogger has been down for a good while, so I'm going to put them up now.


02/05/2011 - 08/05/2011 weeks recap
This week was pretty harsh because I've had a lot to do leading up to hand in, including getting my new script sorted, doing a quick final show presentation for PPD, and filming/working on group brief with Gareth. I've managed to get my script pretty much sorted but I'm not completely sure about the end, because my idea was that he is shown as a giant rampaging robot through the animation, but is revealed as a tiny toy robot playing around at the end, and this concept would be a little bit hard for me to get across. After talking with Dave he said that I should go for an idea where he slips on something falling over and blowing himself up, I think this idea would be much easier to get across and would allow me to do some nice animation. I thought that maybe slipping on a ball could make sense because he is on a beach and someone could have been playing with it. I need to do some testing for my comps because now I am doing it all with still for better quality and I will have no need for annoying tacking. Friday was quite a full day, because on the morning I had to present my ideas for final show, I was just going to go with some straight forward things, including a screen showing my animation, a large high quality print of my robot, and possibly a small real model of my robot. in my presentation I was given the idea of making some fake coins in some way, to go with the theme of a coin operated robot, having my branding on the coin, as well as my blog/website address replacing the writing around the side. I think I will try to do this idea, and if the coin can be the size of a real pound coin it would be used as one of those trolley tokens in supermarkets which you use in place of a pound coin which people sometimes have on key rings. I think the presentation went quite well because I got some good ideas. After PPD on Friday me and Gareth went out filming because we both needed additional footage for our animations, I think that we got pretty much everything we needed done, and we were quite lucky with the weather, because it was the same as the first filming trip so we have some continuity.

Back after Easter

Today was the first day back after Easter, and I had a tutorial with dave and I'm pretty sure I know what I have left to do, and what to get on with. Dave said it is fine for me to go with my new ideas for my robot animation, but I need to make some storyboards or a script. After finalising my new ideas I will probably have to film some new footage, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem, and the other stuff I filmed should be useable somewhere anyway. I also made a little bit of progress on my group brief with Gareth today and we made a little progress on our character. I will probably spend the rest of the week working on my ideas for my own animation, progressing my group brief, and doing paperwork for ppd and work related briefs.

Pictoplasma Cont. 4

This was a picture of Rilla Alexanders character walk. Her character had a series of story books behind it, and Rilla's lecture was read in a very scripted, storybook style.

These pictures were taken at Jeremyvilles character walk. Jeremyville's work is done in a simple cartoon style, and i have to say this doesn't appeal to me at all. I don't think it is bad but the distorted perspective and weirdly drawn in environments, which seem like an after though get to me a bit and its not for me.

Ill end my pictoplasma posts for now, and ill end saying i quite enjoyed the trip, i found almost all of it interesting to at least some degree, and some of the lectures and work i saw gave me some ideas on how i can do some things a different way.

Pictoplasma Cont. 3

These cardboard boxes were actually robots made by 3753% Tordal, and in the character walks people could put their own design on the boxes. The robots had sensors in them to detect movement, acting and moving as they needed to. I liked this work because it wasn't tradition art (as in drawings) really, but it fits with the character based theme of pictoplasma.

These knitted characters were in another character walk made by Anna Hrachovec. I liked this ball character in particular because it looks like a ninja. This was quite a small showing of work but I thought it was quite good.

Pictoplasma Cont. 2

These pictures were taken at one of the character walks by Matt Jones. His character walk was a series of vinyl characters in tea cups which were made by over 60 artists based on and using his own base character. The character isn't overly impressive, and is very simple, but I quite like it, and the whole idea of different artists creating their own interests me. The whole idea of creating a vinyl collectable isn't something i had thought of before, but i think i will look into it at some point.

During Pictoplasma Matt Jones did several workshops on making vinyl toys but sadly i wasn't able to attend because of limited places.

Pictoplasma Cont.

The character walks featured work from various artists, some of which i had heard of before, and others which i hadn't. Some of these pictures were either scans of leaflets and stickers which i got from the character walks, and there are some of the pictures i took which i found most interesting.

This is some of the work done by Jeremy Dower. I like the way that this work was made, but some of the content is a bit weird and i'm not sure on that. During a lecture he said that his work was all done in photoshop and no 3D software was used, even though it looks like it could have been made using zBrush. I think this 3D style, made using photoshop, is quite impressive.

Pictoplasma

A few weeks ago I went to Berlin to the Pictoplasma Festival 2011. While there I attended various lectures, screenings and character walks. I found a lot of the things there very interesting, with only a small selection of things not being my thing. Before the lectures and screenings started the character walks were available to see some of the work done by various artists, most of which were speaking at the lectures as well. Most of the character walks were very interesting, with a few being particularly appealing, and some of them relating to my own work.

My own work and robot animation

Because at this point I don't really have enough time left to complete my original animation idea, and doing some filming and then compositing it all isn't an option because of the style I have chosen, if possible I want to change the animation I make. While filming I got almost all the footage I might need to do my ideas and I think I could end up with a good final piece. So that I don't waste the work I put into my robot, I plan to go with an idea which I had a long time ago while doing test renders, which is making the robot really small, like a toy. I had various ideas for this, and I think any of them would be quite entertaining to watch.

My original idea was always quite ambitions and I had trouble defining the style of the world, with the animatic being around 3 minutes. If it's an options to go with my other ideas for the sake of time, ill be sad to drop my robot animation at least for now, but at least doing it another way will still use my robot and maybe even my other assets.

I have done some tests in cinema 4D to see if compositing my robot works well in the way i plan to use him. My test has my robot as a giant walking out of the fog from the sea towards land. Although i couldn't do any after effects testing, and the robot is composited onto a still image instead of video, at least doing this proved the idea can work.

group brief progress

As my part of my current brief I need to work on an addition brief to create a portfolio/showreel piece. I have chosen to do this as a group brief along with Gareth to make a looping animation. Our idea is that a creature inside a cave will put its hand into a smaller crack and after pulling it out it will be covered with mushrooms which will take over the entire creature. At this point a huge hand will come in from the entrance of the cave and pull back out, only to show that is himself of another creature which will also be overtaken by mushrooms. At this point the animation can continue to loop.

During this Easter break we got all the filming done for this animation, and we should be able to get it done very fast, which would be good considering the limited time left. The filming went fairly well, the weather wasn't perfect but we had good light and only a little bit of trouble with rain. we bother got everything we needed, but to give us the range of shots we need for an animation inside a cave, we will have to use some footage that we filmed outside of the cave and mess with settings in after effects to make it look like night/inside a cave.

These are some pictures from near where we filmed out footage for our group piece.

Portfolio

This is my PDF portfolio, which is set out in the same order as my real one. I also have my CV and branding on the file. The order is set out so that my live brief stuff is together, my E4 stuff is together, and my work purely for college is together. I made both a high and low resolution version of my pdf portfolio so it is easier to load/download over the internet.

I can't find a way to upload my pdf portfolio so ill do that once I find out how I can.

CV stuff

This is my CV which also shows my branding. My branding my basically the name I have chosen to use which is "Shink", a name I have used online for a while, and I couldn't think of anything better for my branding, but I like it. I have a silhouette of my robot next to the name too as I quite like how it looks.

Big Blog Update

I haven't updated my blog in quite a long time, so I will be talking about quite a lot of things. I'm going to talk about the current state and progressions of my work, portfolio development, group project, ppd work, and the Berlin trip.

The first thing to talk about is my portfolio development and CV as I needed these done for my current brief and my interview for third year. I finished my CV which I will upload later before leaving for Pictoplasma, and I'm quite happy with how it looks. My portfolio turned out fairly well showing a range of the work I have done over the course. I will upload my PDF portfolio later along with my CV.

Before leaving for Berlin I wanted as much of my portfolio done as possible but I didn't get everything printed, so I had to do this after coming back. This only gave me 2 days to print my work, complete my 300 word statement of intent, and get everything else ready for my interview. I got everything done in time, although my showreel was simply all my animations in a long video and wasn't cut down to the 30 second length I would have liked.

The trip to Pictoplasma in Berlin was quite interesting, as I saw a lot peoples work and found the lectures and screenings interesting. I will upload some of my photos and images from pictoplasma in a later blog post.

After returning from Berlin I got my portfolio sorted and had my interview on Wednesday the 13th of April. I think my interview went ok, it could have been better but it could have been worse. Considering it was my first real interview I don't think I could have done too much better.

The following two weeks were the Easter break and I've had to use this time to complete ppd and work related things. During this week my and Gareth got our filming done for our group brief, and at the same time we both got footage which can be used in our own projects. As my original script was fairly ambitious and at this point I would need to create around 5 more environments/sets in 3D to even create a trailer version of my animation, I'm hoping I will be able to change the second animation I will submit for the current brief. This would allow me to create some work much faster and with I could use the footage and ideas I already got for this purpose, so hopefully there will not be a problem with this, as with the short time I have left I think changing my animation to the ideas I have in mind using the techniques I plan to use wouldn't be too ambitious.

That is pretty much everything up to date, so ill upload individual posts now with pictoplasma info and my cv/portfolio.