Heads up

Well I won't lie, I've been stuffing my face with turkey and playing chrono trigger on the DS. Thinking little about work, but hell, it's christmas right.

Well today I got back to it, trying to ease my way back in. So here's a screenie on the head for the target that I left unfinished a while back, it's coming together nicely, should be animation friendly too, which is what we want.

Infinito

Finally finished the Ninja, he has eyes and eyelids too. I didn't give him pupils since the origional drawings didn't have any. makes them look more evil.

The eylids are a little shaky, I used nurbs but we don't need to play around with them too much so should be ok. Try and do better on the next two which are gonna involve some facial animation.

the target is already underway so he shouldn't take as long since I won't need to dick about in zBrush for ages.

I posted details over at the team blog but this is the final level of detail. 40k polys and it runs fine. Anymore and we are gonna be breaking out the fire extiguishers on our hard drives.

I'm going to sneak in as much detail as I can on low poly in zBrush export it back to maya and smooth that bitch out to get the same result as above.

Ok well personal notes on the process. Might as well get this out of the way now. Overall this has been a bittersweet experience for me. I think it's an improvement on character models I've done before and I worked a lot faster and picked up some cool tricks. However knowing that if I figured out the retopology and zBrush a little better I could make something even better leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Hmm perhaps that's last nights curry.

In any case I'm pretty happy with myself, I think I've upped my game and I'll step it up more going into the next 2 character models. As for these new enemies I'm not looking forward to the facial modelling and the clothes but I might as well meet these enemies head on. Doing this over the christmas break means we are in a good position in term 2 as well so the pressure isn't too much for my fragile sanity.

I hope the rest of the guys feel the same way about the model or I'm going to look a bit silly.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Brush...

Here is an update just to show my progress today with zBrush. Top image is my starting point and the lower image shows the jawline and chest which are the only changes I made that I kept. I'm fairly pleased as it's my first session in zBrush.

It's hard. I've been trying to learn and do at the same time, a tutorial in one window, zBrush in another and por-I mean music in the last one.

EDIT: Was on the phone to Sam while sorting this and I tried to import it back into Maya and it's definately to many polys to work with let alone animate. I'm pretty pissed off because going back and looking at the low poly model after working with this one makes me feel like shit. I guess I'll have to get over it though, we don't have the power to run such high poly models and I'd rather we had a film that worked than one that doesn't but looks pretty.

After consideration my course of action is going to be as follows:

-Search for a way to compress the high poly model

-Failing that take the low poly model into zBrush again and make changes as best I can, keeping it between 10-40,000 polys.

-Try and recreate the shape of the pecks and jawline again...

-Take that bitch back to maya and finally give him some eyes and that will be that. Someone can rig him.

-Start all of dat again with the target model.

Ironic peace to y'all while I go and gun some people down on Modern Warfare 2.

Dreamy Days

Being at the ZBrush phase with the Ninja I've retreated to thoughts of the other character I have to model. Mainly due to a fear of having to learn something new but also because I want to make a little start on this dude so when I finish the Ninja in ZBrush it's basically a matter of bringing this dude straight in to the same program.

I had hoped to have tomorrow off to play Dragonage: Origins all day but since amazon.co.uk would rather play around with their weiners than dispatch my game I guess I'll be starting the modelling on the target.

Peace.

Update

Cheeky update to show how things are progressing. Been making loads of subtle tweaks over the last two days, most of which are hard to see but they were bugging me when I zoomed in close on maya. So I'm going to show where I stand and give out some criticl analysis.

-Pretty happy with the legs, I like the angles, gives it a bit of style and it looks like my drawing. Won't likely tweak that much more.

-Torso is looking pretty good as well, it gets a bit messy when it hooks up with the shoulder blade but with any luck I can pick up the slack in zBrush.

-I'm not happy with the arms yet, they are the right shape but they don't carry the same style of the legs so I need to work some more on that.

-Now the head, this has been the most annoying part. Having some trouble with the eyes but I'll get there eventually. I have given him a jutting out lip but he isn't going to be speaking so I didn't spend long on this. I decided to leave him without a nose as well since...well it looks kinda funny without it.

Basically I need to finish these bits, add in the belt/sash and the boots, these are so tight to the skin in my drawing though so I might try a test of texturing them straight on to the body. After all of that I guess I can finally try and learn some zBrush and do a basic clean up, and try to put in some definition that's too hard to do in maya.

Oh! And the hands, I need to sort those bastards out...

Ah being a perfectionist is a bitter curse.

Progress Report

Here are some screenies of the Ninja model so far. It's taking a while but it's getting there. Loads of little technical problems have kept coming up but I've managed to fight past most of them. The biggest problem I'm having at the moment is getting some angles on the muscles to give it some style.

I installed Zbrush to see if I could do it in there but one look at the interface and you best believe I closed that window. Probably have a chat with Ferhan on Wednesday about that. I don't want to commit hours to moving vertices if there is a quicker and more effective way to get some definition in there.

I guess I'll try and mold that head until then. KEEP BUILDING AND MOVIN DEM VERTICES!

Form of a...ninja?

I coloured up the model sheets on Thursday but I kept forgetting to upload the damn things. Colour didn't seem neccessary at first but I think it gives it a little more form which can only help with the modelling.

ASYMMETRY!

Just uploading the modelsheets I've done for me and Ferhan to start modelling the characters. I still have to do the Target but I'll probably do that one once I am underway with the ninja.

Role Play

Just a quick post regarding my role in the group in the near future. So far we have all been doing concept work. I concentrated on character design and the storyboarding and pitched in a little with the prop designs mainly weapons as well as a design for the Derelict building. Pretty much everything else I was involved with was stuff we did as a group.

Over Christmas I'll mainly be focusing on modelling the Ninja and Target characters and most likely rigging them and possibly texturing them. As far as I understand things anyway. Plans change but this is what I'm looking at for now. After which I'll be doing some background animation as it's not one of my main areas and we want our main characters to look good in their movements. As for post production I'm not sure yet but Texturing I think helps fill my technical folder.

That's how things stand at the moment but I'm sure this will be revised at some point or another. Looks good for now though so Sally forth!

Update

My oh my it's been a while since I actually posted here. Been concentrating on essays and presentations the last week or so, I still have one of them to finish. Still my presentations are sorted so I'm back in the saddle. Just finished some extra panels for the animatic to make it flow better. I'm also working on some model sheets so that we can jump right into modelling those characters as that'll be my next job.

Tools of the trade

Tools and weapons for the ninja done and dusted

Shoot to thrill

Some concepts I just finished off for the Hitmans sidearm, I'll get cracking on the Ninja stuff this afternoon. the top one is my favourite at the moment, has a sort of traditional feel to it.

Armed 2 da teef

Gave up on maya for today and did these instead, more on this over at the group blog.

Gotta do about 2 pages more like this for the ninja's weapons and Hitmans sidearm.

VICTORY!

couldn't leave it alone, sussed it out no worries all is cool.

I'm probably working in the wrong freakin scale now, ah well cross that bridge later.

Wasteman

Since I couldn't think of anything else to really do I thought I would have little go at starting a model for the ninja so here's the character sheet. That's pretty much all I got done. I was feeling pretty good about just diving in but for some reason that is probably really obvious I can't move around my image planes at all when I load them and sometimes when I load it up it just cuts off half the image. So I can't even set up the file to actually do some work. I think it's just being a dick because I've never had this problem before. I tried restarting a few times but it ain't happening.

Sometimes I have nothing but contempt for that program. I'll see if the moody bitch thing feels up to the task tomorrow but for now I'm gonna work on an essay or something.

Swirly

Spent the morning drawing some stuff and scanning some shizz (for work and my own stuff), I was briefly trapped in a whirlpool of self deprication (two words that I have used more than my short life warrants) but I managed to swim against the tide and sort out an image I needed to do for Sam's movie poster.

Well they say that it's the sign of a true artist when your never happy with anything you draw so lets go with that for now.

mis-en-scene

Back to Bruce Timm's Batman. I wanted to show the intro to the animated series since it's got more great creative stuff that I think we should look at.

Firstly yeah it's waaaaay to dark for what we are going for but I'm looking at it in different ways. First off the architecture in this is all out of whack, but in a good way sharp and shapely to accentuate the dark feel of the piece, we've already looked at disfigured shapes for our film but there's always room for more reference. the environment is just as important for portraying the mood of our film as the characters. It's all part of the mis-en-scene as Kieron would say.

What else, ah yes the music...well I should just let it speak for itself as it's so kick ass. The composer Shirley Walker won awards for this I think, or at least was nominated for them. Basically our film has no dialogue so we need music and or sound effects to fill that silence and this is a gret example of how sound can compliment and build upon the imagery of a piece. Gah all the rising and dipping bits in that piece when the batarangs hit the goons guns and then Bats dives onto the guy. It's great stuff. In any case it's not something we want to underestimate.

Once we have a final animatic we can probably get some sound design or people who study music to look at it and give it a go since I think having some real instrumentals involved would really do us some good.

Codehunters

I couldn't get any good images of this from the web so I found a version of it on youtube. it's not a great version but it'll have to do.

Anyway codehunters is a film that Jared showed me in term 3 I think of our second year. It sort of stuck in the back of my mind and I just think that it is a great example of lighting and texturing. The shadows cast on the characters and environment are also real simple and show in 3D the sort of thing I was talking about with Sean Galloway's colour/ shading style.

I really like the colour scheme in this film as well, nothing stands out too much but at the same time it doesn't just form a blur, I think this would be a cool look for us but with some brighter colours not just greys and browns.

cheeky

Here we are again, Sean "cheeks" Galloway. At one point or another you've probably seen me reference this guy but here he is again simply because he has been one of the biggest influences on my work of late. Like Timm he's a cartoonist/ comic artist and has designed characters for a couple of animated series such as the Spectacular Spiderman cartoon and Hellboy animated.

Like Bruce Timm I admire his very simple but well drafted line work. I always used to add too much detail into my sketches untill I lost the origional image however these guys showed me that a character drawing doesn't have to be super complex to look good. (Damn good)

I love looking at his stuff because it gives me something to work towards but it also makes me cry myself to sleep thinking I'll probably never get there. Still I can chase him all the way and hopefully pick up some neat tricks along the way.

On top of his line work however his colouring style is something that not only influences my own art style but is something I think we should consider for our final film. Very muted colours and simple shading. Despite our film being in 3D I think keeping a look similar to the initial concepts would make an interesting looking film.

Better late than never

Dan brought up a good point yesterday over a game of Uncharted 2 about getting our individual research sorted on our blogs. This is something that usually lets me down as I forget to reference it, usually I just look at something and think "oh that's cool" and incorporate it into my work without thinking. This time however I'm gonna reference some shizz. Some of this stuff has probably been put up by the others on the group blog but this is my own stuff so here goes.

Well lets get the ball rolling with some stuff that has inspired me and my art style since character design and storyboarding is a big part of what I've done so far on the project. I'm sure you all know Bruce Timm or at least recognise his stuff if not then shame on you. He is a comic artist/ cartoonist probably best known for his work on the Batman animated series. I really like the way that he draws the human figure using very simple shapes mixing curves with sharp lines to define muscle tone and portray very strong poses.

The examples I am showing are all black and white because mostly what I take from Bruce Timm's work is the line art

Derelict

Finished that environment design. It turned out ok, never tried to make an image just in photoshop with no pencils before. It was hard to get it to look bare without making it look boring so I kept adding stuff.

I'm too tired to write about it, anyway a picture says a 1000 words.

D.I.Y.

So I went to buy a new sketchpad but once I got home I really didn't feel like drawing anything. I'm running out of sketching steam so to speak so I'm gonna take a break from that for a few days so I can come back strong with some character sketches or some such.

So to make myself feel productive I started up a design for the interior of where the Hitman/Bodyguard is going to be. Everyone seems to be making stuff with shapes in photoshop rather than drawing anything so I figured I would give it a go. It's pretty barebones so far but It's going ok. I made a table in there as well but deleted it quick time since it didn't look right.

I'll just keep adding stuff to this bad boy till it looks right. Want to finish it and maybe start a different design before the weekend since I want to spend some time tackling my essays for Gareth and Kieron.

sketches from the underground

Did these earlier, just trying to think of things that would make up the targets room. Drawing objects instead of characters got real boring real fast though.

Speaking of which...

It's already on the board at college I just forgot to post it up here the other day, finished boards. Give or take a few that may need to be reworked down the line.

Deep sixed

Yet another design. I did the initial sketch a while ago but only just got round to inking/ colouring it because of having to re-do the storyboard etc...

This was based on the idea that the target was in witness protection or something and the mob was after him. This guy has too much character though so the faceless ninjas are a better option.

Hashashin

A concept for an alternative assasin, he's based off of the arabic word Hashasheen or hashshashin or something which is where the word assasin supposedly origionates.

Sad sack

Character design for the target character in out film. Re did the design to make him look more run down and easier to sympathise with. He looks like his dog's just been run over if you ask me.

Meh

Re-did the colours but it pixelated bits beyond f***ery for some reason.

In the light of day

A concept here for the opposing assasins that our hitman will be killing a lot of. I had to keep a simple design which almost killed me, I totally wanted to go overboard and draw like a 90ft long katana etc but this has to be in keeping with the rest of the film. I'm not really sure about the colours to be honest, again though it needs to fit with the rest of the characters and environment so I kept the colours pretty light.

Self reflection

Yesterday we had a pretty good talk about composition in animation. I regret to say I've forgotten the name of the dude who gave us the talk but he was pretty awesome. Some of the aspects we went over I knew of already but there were fresh things I picked up as well. Most importantly I got some decent feedback on my storyboards. He pretty much said that the composition and angles were good but didn't care for the fact that I had coloured them all up, pretty much said I could do the job with some simple tonal work. Also recommended that I think about the screen size when doing the panels, something that I had completely neglected.

Great bit of constructive crit so I've been boarding some scenes today from our revised script taking into consideration some of the things I was told.

Once I find out the dudes name I'll revisit this post.

Stay loose.

Target Sighted

Design for the target, Was thinking mebbe he should be a shamed politician or something. More on the group blog.

Ciao

Windswept and interesting

Since we have a much firmer idea of the story now I was thinking about the final look we are gonna go for with the characters so I sketched up the Hitman or Bodyguard. I didn't want to stray too far from Sam's design since it was pretty strong anyway but well here it is anyway, I will probably do a few variants.

I'll try and get some nice pieces done for the target and mebbe some of the other assasins too before I get back to storyboarding.

Peace.

Follow up

Yeah well I've been coming up short trying to write some ideas for our film so I drew that little strip of this idea me and Lewis were mucking about with yesterday.

We were thinking of the most random plot twist. Sam said he wanted a massive explosion so I was thinking it's so godamned big it could be seen from space and well...the strip you see below was born.

I'm doing Kierons film analysis thingy at the moment as well and I watched Rear Window which is a great example of establishing everything quickly and entirely visually so I might post that up. I also have some great examples of short stories in this book called "The best american comics 2008" So I'll bring that in and show y'all.

I dunno how much it will help us but there are some quality little stories in there that don't involve deep backstories.

It's a little out there

Translation:

"Foolish Eartlings they offer nothing but violence and fart jokes! They are unworthy of joining the interstellar collective of planets! Come let us return to Flajardy 7 and turn in our report"

"Commander please reconsider! What of the entertainment broadcast the Gilmore Girls?! Surely this work of genuis can make a case for humanities value?"

"Fear not sub-commander, I picked up the full box set on blu-ray from the HMV sale!"

"AH, good thinking sir! Very well then let us make haste away from this damp space rock!"