Final Animations With Sound

Future Cinema Project – Bookshelf Layout

We decided where we would put each animation in relation to the bookshelf and then drew a bookshelf layout diagram.

There will only be one bookshelf but there will be two animations per section of the bookshelf that appear at different times as they will be triggered by different objects

Future Cinema Project – Final Animations No Sound

Below are the final versions of our animations (with occlusion added to the beauty).

Future Cinema Project – Occlusion

Below are the occlusion versions of our animations:

Future Cinema Project – Creatures First Animation

Below are all my animations. I just need to record and add sound effects and also change the background to white as the bookshelf we’re using is white.

Future Cinema Project – Modelled Creatures

Here are the creatures after they’ve been modelled in Maya.

The above are the untextured versions. The modelling was relatively easy to do for the Grape Squid and the Bookworm. However, the Cactus Boy was slightly more challenging as it took a few different tries to make the contours of his face and body. In the end I achieved it by using a sphere for his head and raising every other column of vertices and then smoothing the whole thing twice. I used a cuboid for his body and cut it in ways so that his legs were connected and then I used a sort of 3D trapezium to make his arms. It also took a few tries to get his spikes right, as I found they were too big/small if they were any bigger/smaller than the current ones.

The below are the textures versions.

The two important things to mention about the textured Cactus Boy are that a) I decided to give him a mouth and b) I gave his lambert texture a slight bump mapping. I decided to give him a mouth because the shape of the sphere made him look weird when no mouth was present. I also felt that the bump mapping was essential for making him more realistic, as, without the bump mapping, his skin was TOO smooth and made him look more like a ball than a cactus. I think learning this subtle bump mapping technique was also very useful because it seems that is it quite commonly used when texturing characters/objects with a lambert shader.

I encountered a few problems when texturing this Bookworm. Firstly, I couldn’t texture him in the normal way of selecting a file to replace the colour because when I rendered it, the words came out blurry and thus didn’t look very good. So, I decided that I would have to apply the words through bump mapping. This did work in the end but I had to play around with the settings to get an effect that was just right, otherwise it would’ve looked too strong. I also had to use the UV texture editor to adjust the positioning of bits of the text; particularly the ones in his hair. The most problematic part though, was that no matter what I tried, the text would just not display properly on his body/tail and so I ended up having to texture that with a barcode instead (which is also part of a book, so still relating to the bookworm theme), but even that didn’t turn out like an obvious barcode, which is what I had wanted.

Future Cinema Project – Initial Creature Designs

Here are some quick concepts I came up with for the character designs. I thought it might be quite fun to use fruits combined with animals, but after discussing our ideas we decided that it would good if the creatures’ appearances’ related to the objects shown in the bookshelf that we’ll be using. So me and Sam will be combining our creature ideas to make more complex/developed creatures and then we’ll model/texture/animate them in Maya.

Me and Sam decided we would make a total of 6 creatures for now and then see if we need more/less depending on what they’re actually going to do and what props we’re going to use, but we can’t decide that yet until we try out the technologies that will make what we want to do work. So we chose to develop 3 each from our initial designs. The 3 we decided to choose out of my ones were: the cactus, the grape squid and the strawberry snake (but change it into a camouflaged bookworm).

The above shows a more developed version of the chosen 3 and they’re what I’ll basing my Maya models on.

Future Cinema Project – Ideas

We decided on the idea of projecting the creatures onto a bookshelf containing various objects and as these objects are moved/disturbed it triggers an animation/response from the creatures. I felt that we could use this to explore the concept ‘just because we cannot see them does not mean they’re not there’ and we agreed that this would be a good theme to work around.