Need to work out the white balance and stabilise it a bit, but the scene’s working out pretty well.

Today, I worked on two more bits of animation for the first scene, and the keys for another part:

The replacement tail swish, which I think is smoother. I also shortened the length of the snout because it was horribly off model and too long, making the character look ugly.

And the belly rumble, which I don’t think is quite finished yet. Hmm, something is wrong with it.

Will work more later!

This week I have been working on the first scene of my film, and it contains a surprising amount of complexity for such a simple scene. In order to give myself time and spark to work on the more intensive scenes, me and Peter worked out how to do the aligator’s acting using limited animation, and Neil advised me on how to create the perfect pose for the attitude of the gator.

Not having set up my line tester yet (though a webcam is on it’s way!!) I was animating blind, having only the time honoured skills of rolling and flipping to guide me. I think it went rather well, considering. There’s still a lot of work to do (in both inbetweening and the animation) but I’m confident that I’ll be able to do it.

Talking of the first scene, I also pencilled out the layout for it, something that took me on-and-off about two days. Quite slow considering the amount of layouts I need to get through, but still, it’s a start.

Updated. The ending isn’t finished, but it’s getting there.

Well, it’s been a full week since I last updated, so here we go. I’ve been working out the alligator character so that he is animatable and sensible to work with. Surprisingly, there was very little to work out from my original design, just minor simplifications here and there. Specifically, the scutes on his belly and the frills on the back of his head. Instead of the frills going all the way to his tail, he only has four – three on the head and one on the upper back. And the scutes are formed only on the belly and tail – using the sphere form of his stomach to create the upper ones (one at the top, one at the bottom, and two splitting the sphere into thirds), and the cylinder forms for the ones on the tail. The chest area, on the other hand, has no splits in it. After a few attempts, I can get him roughly on model consistently, so that must count for something.

Still to do: Man model sheet.

Today I have been texturing my characters.

Neither are 100% finished, but I think I have made enough progress to post an update. Once these characters are complete, I will work on the environment.

The man is demonstrating the flipped normal polygon shader I researched, which is actually quite elementary. It will form the basis to most of the objects in my film, as I do not have enough polygons to do everything I want with the characters and props. His ear is the most obvious beneficiary of it.

Along with the UV Offset controls and Flipped Normal shaders, I will also be researching other ways to make my film look good while minimising the amount of work the renderer has to do. For example, a fake fresnel shader made with facing ratio hooked to transparency and some kind of colourisation. I’d know how to do it in a game engine, but not Maya, surprisingly!

And unfortunately, 400 polygons over budget – but for a reason. Most of the extraneous mesh is to make deformations more pleasing on the big screen, something I could get away with half the total on a games console.

Update:
Aligator: 100% modelled, 100% UV Mapped, 0% Rigged.
Posh Man: 100% Modelled, 100% UV Mapped, 0% Rigged.

Now that the animatic has been made, I can start work on the 3D models for the characters.

Since there are two characters within this short, I can spend a lot of time on them. I found out early on that using absolutely authetic methods for creating the characters is unfeasable – in a film you would need a lot cleaner, deformable meshes, so I increased my initial poly count limit from 600 to 800 (not including external “flair” mesh). The current mesh progress is:

Aligator: 100% modelled, 100% UV Mapped, 0% Rigged.
Posh Man: 80% Modelled, 0% UV Mapped, 0% Rigged.

Here are some progress renders:

Finally finished the first pass of the animatic, had to go in and actually animate some of the shots to get them to read.

1:51, just under my 2 minute cutoff point. I’m pretty pleased with it.