Saturday 25 February 2012

Storyboards

So I used the shot list to create some storyboards of the key scenes in the film:


Tuesday 21 February 2012

Moving Image

This modules title was 'interpretation'. We were put into groups and assigned a script which we had to interpret what we thought it should be shot as and the style the film should be.
In our groups we were allocated specific roles and had to make sure we researched and understood what our role entailed, and then perform that role to the best of our abilities.
Each group member, st the end of the five weeks, had to produce their own edit of the final film.
The roles that I was given in this project were Lighting, Props and Storyboarding.
For my role in lighting I first looked at how lights should be set up in an ideal shot, for this I looked at videos on YouTube such as these:



As well as watching many examples of set lighting, especially set lighting at night, as the film we would be shooting would be in the dark, I also read countless forums where people were discussing variations of set lighting and techniques that worked best for them, and read pages of information about the technological side of lighting, the best lights to get and how to handle them.

Sunday 12 February 2012

Self Evaluation for DP2: 3D Animation Project

In my environment I was trying to get across the idea of the terrain being as cold and barren as possible. The way in which I attempted to do this was to fill it with cold icy rocks and mounds of snow. There were no trees or plants growing, and I used the particle effects engine to generate heavy snow falling from the sky.


The other thing I wanted to do was to make the place look eerie and deserted. The way I accomplished this was to attach the only light source (other than the glowing reactor and portal) to the camera itself, so that the objects in the rooms would come looming creepily out of you from the darkness.


In my character design I was trying to express the fact that his powers were based in domination and control, and so I designed him to give him a look of strength and weight with a aura of darkness. This is shown in the design by my use of heavy armor covered in sharp spikes and large, formidable weapons.


Design methods I used, for character design were to start from the beginning with the most basic ideas and themes, creating brainstorms of characters based on simple shapes and ideas, along with notes of how each drawing would look to a viewer and how they might be improved upon, working up to my final design.
With my environment, I also drew out room plans and ideas of what the environment would be like and what it could contain, many of the ideas made it into the final design, however others were scrapped or changed.


Some of the problems I had during production were that the snow was not showing up on the final render at all, as there was too little of it to register.
In order to fix the issue I was having with the snow, I simply added more particle generators into the environment and angled them against each other to make it like more like a blizzard and for there to be enough particles to register.


While rendering the video, I followed the tutorial and saved the files starting at 00000, so that the files would number upward and be in the correct order for Premiere to import. However, once the files saved and I tried to import them into premiere, I found that the video it created cut off at 15 seconds.
To fix the problem with the 15 second video, I had to go into the jpg files and look over the file name, here I found that occasionally a random file number was missing from the sequence (eg. 00756) and this was causing the import to cut off when it hit this missing file. The files that were missing were saved under different names at the end of the sequence.I simply had to rename the files so that they took their proper place in the sequence and re-import the footage.


There are a few points in which I believe I could have improved on. The textures that used on my design I think gave a good insight into the image I had originally wished to portray, but if I was able to get access to more detailed library of materials and also a better understanding of how to manipulate these materials I feel I could have developed exactly the image I wanted. After doing more in-depth research into the program I was able to identify that it was possible to use higher-end and better rendering programs than the one I used, the only problem was that they were a lot more detailed and complex, If I had been able to gain a better understanding of these rendering programs I feel I would have been able to manipulate them to produce a higher quality Final Render.

Final Environment Images and Video

These were the four final high resolution screen shots of my 3D environment:






And this is the one minute video fly through of the environment:


Final Character Images

These were the final model drawings for my character:


I also created two comic book covers/ posters for my character as well, using pencil sketches and Photoshop.


The positions I chose to draw him in are to represent the fact that he can be a strong and powerful warrior, as shown in the low camera shot, with him standing tall, looming ominously over the viewer, but he could also be shown to have a more vulnerable and human side, looking occasionally thoughtful or contemplative, or occasionally showing remorse and sadness.



I was very pleased with how the posters turned out. At first the title of the comic was in black and white, and while this looked good in itself, as a whole picture it looked all too plain against the vibrant blue of the character, so in the end I changed it to red, as more blue was far too much for the page and red contrasted nicely.

Environment Development

Different parts of my environment have different influences and sources for my research. For the transportation part of my lair I liked the idea of having a precipice stretching out into a huge dome, like 'Cerebro' from X-Men.


After researching sever room layouts and atmospheres I decided that the way the game Half Life 2 portrayed living quarters best described the feeling I intended for the room. The civilian houses in this game had a grimy, abandoned look to them that I thought would fit the look I was going for as the character would spend little of his time in this room.

There would also be a main hall and atrium to the building, decorated with ornately carved tables, accessed by an automatic aperture style door at the entrance.  After researching how best to structure the building if it were to be placed in an icy tundra I decided that the entrance should be shaped like an igloo, in order to keep the cold at bay and the roofs slanted or curved against the arctic winds.

My lair would also need a power source for all this, and so I intended to put a reactor room underneath the facility as a power source. This room also became the lab where my character's assistant Xalek worked and lived. I researched reactor design and looked at images of reactors and how they were laid out to get an idea of how to structure my own.

In the early plans, where the portal now stands there was initially a bowl of liquid that the character was going to use for skrying (a process by which one gazes into the water and sees far off visions) however in the first 3D designs, this became a floating orb, a globe, with which the character could control the weather, but this idea also changed into a portal that was controlled by the globe ad used to travel to anywhere on earth.. The whole area was also not originally encased in an orb.

Another difference from the original designs for the lair was that the ice and snow started off as sand, but ice seemed to lend itself better to the build and architecture that was taking shape. 
I took the idea of the broken fences peeling open to allow entry and instead allied that to the doors, the doors in the lair automatically open like the gaping mouths of a living creature, giving the feeling that the building itself is alive.

Learning to use this software was slow at first as I learned the basics of how to manipulate simple shapes, but once I had successfully learned the basics, the rooms took shape rather quickly. The hardest part was learning to apply textures and manipulate them on the objects surface.

Once I was happy with my model, I decided to start texture mapping. This was very difficult at first as I was unsure of how to modify textures on the surface of the objects, and the default for the program would occasionally come out looking over stretched or oddly distorted. Luckily once I figured it out things became much easier and gradually my textures began to take shape in the environment, giving it a lot more depth and detail and making it look much more realistic. 


Character Development

For this project I was assigned to create the lair of a super hero or villain and to design the said super hero/ villain, owner of the lair. For submission I had to present a 1 minute animated fly-through of 4 rooms that best represented my character, and a series of drawings of my character during development, including the finished pieces.

Through looking at how to design environment and props, I explored and practiced modelling, texturing, lighting and camera techniques in order to gain a better understanding of how to produce an animation.

Half of this course was based in character design, coming up with a character that could operate out of the lair that we were designing.

My character design was based on several different influences. It is largely influenced by the popular online multiplayer game World of Warcraft. Specifically a character called the 'Lich King'



I liked this style of character because they seemed like strong characters that would be able to wield large weapons and exhibit a lot of control and power, they also seem the sort of characters that would have minions and servants working for them, as my character would have. I also like the juxtaposition of a dark knight dressed in medieval armor surrounded by high tech equipment like arc reactors and modern computers in the environment.

In the end I created some semi final ideas for my finished character out of these i chose my final design. 
I decided that this character was the best one for the project because his design lent itself to the virtual space I had created better than any of the others. His large spiked armor of his suit could be made of ice and his weapon carved of the same. He also wears furs around his waist like many people who live in colder environments for warmth, giving him the desired look.

Thursday 2 February 2012

Character Design and 3D Update

OK so, I decided on which of the previous four was going to be my superhero, and I also decided that the praying mantis looking creature (now called Xalek) is going to be his assistant who works in the lab for him, these are the pictures I'm going to use for the posters:




They're pretty rough at the moment but hopefully they'll look good once they're finished. I still haven't decided on on hero name for this character, but I'm thinking something along the lines of 'Frost Bite' 'Dark Blizzard' 'Cryo' or 'Glacialis' Etc. The reason I chose this character is that he best suits the Ice landscape that is rapidly taking shape in 3Ds Max. The spikes on his armor are made from icicles and his weapon is carved ice.
On a similar note these are some screen shots from my 3D environment so far:




The base does have a roof, but its currently invisible so that I can work inside the building. Currently I'm putting down the tracks that the camera will fly through on and tweaking the lighting. I'm also thinking of changing the texture of the portal and arc reactor. 
Some of the hardest parts so far have been the making the grated floors and handrails and modifying the textures, especially figuring out how to get textures onto unusual objects, but now that I know how, it seems so much easier. I have also had some trouble getting the camera tracks in the correct level, I still haven't managed to get the tracks smooth, and there are a lot of sharp corners that need evening out. One of my favorite parts is the snow, which you cant see from the screen shots, but falls from the orange boxes above the environment.