Characters

I have been a busy bee over the past week and the set is completely finalised, it just needs the textures adding when they are finished. I have also finished modelling 4 of the 8 characters of the CG side of our animation. 

(left to right) The grandfather, the father, the boyfriend and the girlfriend. 

I still have 2 kids and a grandmother to model, along with the main character Rookie. Who has a very similar build to the father, so I may recycle and adjust parts if necessary. However at the moment we still have 14 weeks left so I don't need to be cutting corners just yet!


Next week I hope to finish all of the characters and get started on rigging them! It all seemed so far away just 4 weeks ago, and I am surprised with how fast things seem to be going. We haven't hit any major issues yet (fingers crossed, touch wood and all those superstitious things!!) and I have 5 back ups of my work, which some would call overkill but I'd like to be safe!


Mat has been working hard and throwing out textures this week, he also blocked out another shot so things are also moving on well for him for the time being.


Instead of having to model about 20 characters I have found a rig online that can be used in student work. You can change his clothes and hair and general appearance, we are going to use him as the background characters, as they won't be seen too close up. Such as waiters, passers by, stall owners and alike, these characters will help the whole place feel a lot more 'real'...things are sounding more and more ambitious...we're quietly confident though!


Until next time.

Lighting

The set designing is unfortunately still taking longer than we had anticipated...however we are getting somewhere. We're almost at the point where things are starting to come together quickly and look awesome!


I have been working on the lighting and I am using a rig that was given to me by a friend on the games design course (James Burton). I got it last year but didn't really understand it so I didn't end up using it, however with a littler more knowledge of Maya, I now understand the main functions and how to achieve some great results with some small tweaking of certain attributes.


Here are some text shots of the set with the lighting and some of the adjustments I made to achieve them.


The initial lighting rig gave the results below, which are a lot more impressive than any lighting setup I could make myself! However it was a little too blue and cold for the scene we wanted to set.

So I simply adjusted the colour of the directional light to a warmer 

However we thought this was a bit too dark and orange so I made the colour more pale and increased the intensity slightly. I seemed a little dark in the shadows too, so I increased the intensity of the bounce light as well as it's colour to one similar of the directional light, with just a small hint of blue.

I tested some renders on other parts of the set too.

I took a little more orange out of the main light source and very slightly increased it's intensity to give this final result, which I am very pleased with, but still feel it will need tweaking before it's final. Once all of the textures are in they will give us a better idea of how the light is reacting with the objects in the scene and what adjustments might need to be made. Once I show the lecturers there will need to be some changes as usual, however it's better to get a third and fourth opinion and get it right.


Until next time.