Character and Narrative 11: Modeling and Rigging the Robot

This Robot has been giving me no end of trouble, when modeling the eyes i had trouble making them look inorganic, as the smoothing and unevenness of me inserting edge loops couldn't do it. This is when Matt showed me another technique using booleans to use one object to cut out another object, which looked so much better.

The difference in the model compared to Matt's tutorial model definitely was an added struggle for me. Because they were quite different i lost a lot of confidence, which in turn made me work less effectively. Furthermore i am not looking forward to getting to painting influence weights because of my character being completely mechanical i want almost all of the segments in the legs head and body to not stretch at all, which is very different to the smoothed out painting for the tutorial model. Before i even get to that though i have to get past joint orientation and constraints, which is something i have no idea how to do effectively.

I am very behind schedule and unsure how to progress currently.

I dislike Maya.

Character and Narrative 10: Presentation and feedback

Today me and Katy gave our presentation. We showed all the work we had produced up to this point, unfortunately i didn't get to show some of my proof of concept work for the sea and the water caustics in maya due to a technical screw up on my part.

I got a lot of feedback that was useful, particularly with the water. Matt said that it would be best to set a deadline to decide on, and to look at some other examples of water such as the water in Pingu for the surface, which looks promising and when i have modelled the character and boat i will see how it looks. It was also suggested to look at The Deep by Pes for underwater effects, it has less caustics and more ocean particles. Matt also mentioned about my character design that i should have look at a wider range of examples, rather than just robots to also look at things like switches and metal bins. Finally Sara mentioned that she didn't think the characters fit together. She suggested that we should draw each others designs then swap back and forth till they look closer to each other. I wasn't sure how to feel about this advice because they will look similar because they will both be 3D but also they weren't supposed to look remotely similar in the first place. We did take this advice on board though and tried out drawing each others characters.

Character and narrative 9: Sound design

For the sound design we decided that Katy would pick the background noise and the sound that the mermaid would make (we didn't want any characters to speak) while i would decide on the noises that the robot would make.

I started by experimenting with the old-school dial up internet noise as there is a lot of variation in sounds that i thought could show a few different emotions, but it didn't quite have the range of sounds i think i might need, so i will look at other computer generated noises and pick a few, then in post production i will play around with which sounds sound the best.

Character and Narrative 8: Sea Tests

To prepare for the making on the animation i tried out a few different ideas for water.

I started with a plane with a dynamic water texture on it and compared it being partially see through and it being completely solid.

After fiddling around with settings i had this accident where the matte edges had the movement of the water texture but was still a completely flat colour.

After recreating my accident i produced this, which is a flat matte colour but also shows some movement where the plane meets other objects. We will most likely use this for the final animation.

I also looked at volume caustics on water using a youtube guide, and though the outcome looks pretty good, it takes a long time to render and i don't completely remember the method, so i will have to see how much time we have left when it comes to the end of the animation.

Character and Narrative 7: Controls

Making controls for the character was extremely easy, however making sure they constrain the joints correctly is where i keep failing. I don't understand joint orientation very much, and i have been having a huge amount of problems with it. It seems every other joint i constrain suddenly blasts into the wrong position and i have no clue how to fix it. Matt has been a godsend when to comes to help, but i feel that this is where most of my frustation comes from.

Character and Narrative 4: Character design

For our character design we split up to create each character. I started by Creating a mood board of robots that i liked the design of. I added to this as i went.

We decided that for the story the robot ought to be cute, which would also mean simpler modelling and rigging when it came to it.

I had a go at a few different designs on my test page trying out a few ideas, and discovering they wouldnt work very well, such as having a speaker for a mouth and camera lenses for eyes; and got together with Katy again to decided on some final designs. We picked four that i explored in more detail, and then decided on a final design.

Below is the final design for the robot.

Character and Narrative 6: Storyboards

For the storyboard me and Katy got together to first draught the idea on post-it notes and decided on a rough idea. I found Katy wasn't as good a work partner for this section, as she didn't add any consideration for different camera angles, even picking up square post-its rather than some in a more similar aspect ratio that we would be working in (16:9). However when it came down to deciding what to have for our story boards she was a lot better at drawing them out in a much cleaner way compared to my own style, which is often very loose and rushed.

Then Katy drew them out in a much neater way on a large piece of paper to be scanned later to make an animatic with. I then scanned these in and used them as an outline to go over so that i can show camera/character directions in photoshop/Aftereffects.

At this point Katy felt the need to re draw out the story boards again neater for submission. I didn't think this was necessary, as we had already got a neat storyboard to submit already, but i didn't want to argue as i didn't know for certain. I just felt this was a bad use of her time.